Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) takes film and its histories as the staging ground for explorations of language, representation, identity, and ideology. In works that refigure an expansive and ecumenical range of world cinema—from Wong Kar-wai to Rainer Werner Fassbinder—Wong uses his own versatile, virtuosic capacity for role-playing to construct new personas. He samples gestures and facial expressions from the big screen in order to both expose film’s mechanisms of artifice and to articulate a complex, transcultural subject position.

Ming Wong’s solo exhibition at UCCA, his first in Beijing, presents a selection of his films and photographs alongside a newly commissioned installation and performance. Wong’s new creations stem from his recent ongoing research on the modernization of Cantonese opera and the history of science fiction in formerly Communist countries, resulting in his recombination of films including Last Year at Marienbad and Solaris with this Southern Chinese vein of theater. By linking these traditional modalities with the outdated futurism of science fiction, Wong’s exhibition outlines a trajectory of utopian imagery through two separate but interrelated systems of cultural production.