MING WONG: EMOTION PICTURES
In conjunction with Cinema Pacific’s Focus: Singapore, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the White Box Gallery at the UO in Portland will present two media installations by Singaporean artist Ming Wong. Wong will give a live performance and artist talk via Skype to audiences in both the Schnitzer Museum and White Stag Buildings on Sunday, April 21. Singapore’s representative to the 2009 Venice Biennale, Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. The JSMA will present Ming Wong’s 3-screen video installation, Life and Death in Venice (2010, 16 min.), a revisiting of Luchino Visconti¹s 1971 film Death in Venice. On opposite screens the artist performs the roles of both the aging composer/writer Gustav von Aschenbach as well as Tadzio, the adolescent boy who transfixes him. On view at the White Box Gallery in Portland will be Wong’s Life of Imitation (2009, 13 min.), inspired by the classic Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life (screening at 4 p.m. on April 21 at the Northwest Film Center, immediately after Ming Wong’s live Skype performance). This double-screen projection features three male actors from the main ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay and Indian) taking turns playing the film’s black mother and her light-skinned daughter.
Live Performance and Artist Talk:
April 21 at 2 p.m. in JSMA and Portland’s White Box Gallery
Life and Death in Venice:
April 12 – June 2 in the JSMA
Life of Imitation:
April 4 – May 4 in the White Box Gallery, Portland
VISITING ARTISTS COLIN GOH and YEN YEN WOO
Visiting Singaporean filmmakers Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo are a husband-and-wife team with a remarkably eclectic slate of productions. They have released two feature films, including Singapore Dreaming, praised by Variety as “a graceful satire on Western capitalism in the East.” Goh and Woo’s film freely employs the ‘Singlish’ (Singaporean English) dialect that the Singaporean government has attempted to suppress. Publishers of the parodic Coxford Singlish Dictionary, Goh and Woo are experts on the controversial dialect, and they will deliver a Jeremiah Lecture on the subject of “Singlish: An Authentic or Broken Voice?” Finally, Goh and Woo will project and discuss episodes from Dim Sum Warriors, their latest project, a graphic novel that is also an educational Chinese-English iPad app, in the Eugene Public Library.
“Singlish: An Authentic or Broken Voice?”:
April 19 at 4p.m.. JSMA
Dim Sum Warriors:
April 20 at 1 p.m , Eugene Public Library
Singapore Dreaming:
April 20 at 4p.m.. Bijou
Cosponsored with the UO Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Asian Studies, CABA, Comics Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics.