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MING WONG (*1971) lives in Berlin. He works
with cinema and popular culture to consider how one's identity is constructed,
reproduced and circulated. Through imperfect translations and reenactments of
classic world cinema in which the artist plays all of the characters, Wong's
videos, photographs, installations, and performances uncover the slippages that
hunt our ideas of authenticity and originality. Wong's work has recently been
shown at Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan, 2019 - 2020), Hayward Gallery (London,
2018), Busan Biennale (2018), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin, 2018) and DAK'ART,
Dakar Biennale (Senegal, 2018).
“Those who didn’t know the veterans of WWII, the unimaginable tragedy, suffering, and death of 60 plus million people, the untimely deaths of brothers, uncles, fathers, mothers, the horrendous waste of human potential, will most likely never understand why this song has such enormous emotional power. ... I can’t listen to this song without weeping”, writes a veteran of the Pacific War (1937–45) in the comment section on YouTube. Probably true. Bali Ha’i, the achingly pathetic tune sung by the character Bloody Mary in the musical South Pacific, interpreted again and again by different singers and later made into a Hollywood film, would hardly be bearable today if Ming Wong had not cut up various renderings of the song, then reassembled them and edited himself into the sequence as a somewhat creepy wooing “local”. As on an old cathode-ray TV set on which several channels are flickering at the same time, Wong tells his own version of Bloody Mary, a patriarchess from a Pacific island who sells tropical kitsch and with her siren-like song tries to lure the young US lieutenant Joseph Cable to her island, Bali Hai’i, in the hope he will marry her daughter.
Bloody Mary is a character from the book Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. In the original story, she hails from Tonkin, the northernmost region of today’s Vietnam, and was brought to the volcanic island in the Pacific by a French plantation owner. The role of Bloody Mary has been played by actresses of various ethnic origins, appearing alternately as Black (the most famous being Juanita Hall, who created the character on stage), Asian or Pacific Islander. It hardly mattered, as long as they were “exotic” and could somehow be associated with the South Seas. Because the South Seas, a cluster of islands that extends to both sides of the Date Line over an area of several million square kilometres sea south of the equator, was and still is idealised by the film and tourism industry as one big stereotypical paradise—to such a point that it makes one weep.
Promotional photograph for the film South Pacific (1958), collection of Ming Wong
Bloody Mary mit Bildstörung
by Olaf Stüber“Those who didn’t know the veterans of WWII, the unimaginable tragedy, suffering, and death of 60 plus million people, the untimely deaths of brothers, uncles, fathers, mothers, the horrendous waste of human potential, will most likely never understand why this song has such enormous emotional power. ... I can’t listen to this song without weeping”, writes a veteran of the Pacific War (1937–45) in the comment section on YouTube. Probably true. Bali Ha’i, the achingly pathetic tune sung by the character Bloody Mary in the musical South Pacific, interpreted again and again by different singers and later made into a Hollywood film, would hardly be bearable today if Ming Wong had not cut up various renderings of the song, then reassembled them and edited himself into the sequence as a somewhat creepy wooing “local”. As on an old cathode-ray TV set on which several channels are flickering at the same time, Wong tells his own version of Bloody Mary, a patriarchess from a Pacific island who sells tropical kitsch and with her siren-like song tries to lure the young US lieutenant Joseph Cable to her island, Bali Hai’i, in the hope he will marry her daughter.
Bloody Mary is a character from the book Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. In the original story, she hails from Tonkin, the northernmost region of today’s Vietnam, and was brought to the volcanic island in the Pacific by a French plantation owner. The role of Bloody Mary has been played by actresses of various ethnic origins, appearing alternately as Black (the most famous being Juanita Hall, who created the character on stage), Asian or Pacific Islander. It hardly mattered, as long as they were “exotic” and could somehow be associated with the South Seas. Because the South Seas, a cluster of islands that extends to both sides of the Date Line over an area of several million square kilometres sea south of the equator, was and still is idealised by the film and tourism industry as one big stereotypical paradise—to such a point that it makes one weep.

