Staged Fictions is a group exhibition featuring three artists—Patty Chang (New York), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore) and Adrian Wong (Hong Kong)—whose works explore strategies of making and re-making real and imagined narratives through film, video, performance and installation. Comprised of mostly video and installation, the works featured in Staged Fictions are unified by their departure from singular, essentialist, or fixed points of origin. Instead they embrace moments of bifurcation, ambiguity and obscurity through blurring the lines between performance and choreography and real-life documentation. Such contemporary processes of mythmaking are designed to unveil the construction of culture and the body of ‘history’. As these predominantly filmic explorations reveal, invented encounters, imagined histories and fabricated scenarios can overlap with the realities and attributes of our contemporary condition, giving way to an ‘embodiment of making’ that is at once unavoidably real and eminently imagined.

New York artist Patty Chang is well known for her performative artworks which deal with issues of gender, sexuality, and identity. Using video as a method of documentation and interpretation, Chang’s performances are marked by their visceral and confrontational nature, and often contain undertones of discomfort leading to pain or distress. For Staged Fictions, Chang presents new works—one filmed in China’s Xinjiang Province and another along the border zone of China, Laos and Vietnam—that similarly interweave moments of real trauma with disjunctive or fantasty-like narratives that obliquely point to modernizing forces affecting the region. Staged Fictions represents the first time these works have been shown in Asia.

The two existing works by filmmaker and artist Ho Tzu Nyen in Staged Fictions meditate on the dialectical relationship between painting and cinema, the still and the moving image. Utama Every Name in History is I (2003), a short film that meditates on Utama, a legendary figure in pre-colonial Malay history who is responsible for coining the name Singapore and whose questionable status suggests an ambiguous multiplicity of possible identities. Ho’s spectacular Earth (2009) features some fifty actors strewn about a carefully constructed set resembling a modern day rubbish dump. A study in light, composition and slowed movements luxuriously captured on film, Earth stages late renaissance Italian and French tableau vivant paintings as post-apocalyptic, disaster-ridden silent dramas.

Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong’s work crisscrosses disciplines of installation, design, performance, and theatre; and engages in idiosyncratic fields of research that mine personal and collective histories. Shown for the first time in Hong Kong, his video Umbrellahead, I Will Find You (2010) is a thirty-minute theater production that was the culmination of a three-month intensive research project relating to urban redevelopment in the Western district on Hong Kong Island. Staged Fictions will also debut his newest work—a film entitled The Pelagic Floor (2011) filmed recently in Hong Kong.

Staged Fictions: Patty Chang, Ho Tzu Nyen and Adrian Wong
24.05.2011 – 2.06.2011 / 14.06.2011 – 18.07.2011
Artists: Patty CHANG, HO Tzu Nyen, Adrian WONG
Curator: Pauline J. YAO
Reception: 27.05.2011, 6.00pm to 8.00pm