Ming Wong’s video installation Life and Death in Venice, is a re-visitation of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice, based on the novella of the same title by the German author and Nobel Prize laureate, Thomas Mann. The book/film follows the aging German writer/musician Professor Aschenbach on his sojourn to Venice where he meets and secretly pursues Tadzio, a young Polish aristocratic boy whose uncorrupted youth and beauty provokes his inward reflection.
Wong who is the same age as Visconti’s film made in 1971 is 20 years too old or too young to be either Aschenbach or Tadzio and plays the parts of both characters in his latest work Life and Death in Venice. Entirely self-directed, produced and conceived during his award winning presentation Life of Imitation for the Singapore Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Wong’s new work raises a self-reflective and biographical spin on the concept of ‘arriving’ and ‘departing’ in one’s artistic career and personal life. The work boldly delves into the artist’s inner expressivities and uncertainties, as he negotiates the consciousness of age, his private and professional development.
It also mirrors Thomas Mann’s own creative process, Mann having originally written Death in Venice during his mid-career and in his mid-thirties. On another level, Wong’s rendition of Life and Death in Venice aptly acknowledges the identities of the 2 cities/countries he has lived and worked in over the past year – Berlin, Germany and Venice, Italy. This screening allows the viewer to become the pursuer and the pursued, a voyeur in this cycle of youth/age.
Wong’s Life and Death in Venice, presented in an innovative fusion of cinema’s ‘black box’ and the gallery’s ‘white cube’ setting, challenges film’s perennial leitmotifs on youth and age, beauty and disease, perfection and corruption, spirituality and sensuality. It also casts a close lens over the shifting arrangements of modernity, existing social mores, moral inhibitions and art as an ethical practice. Following its Singapore premiere at Third Floor, Life and Death in Venice will be screened at the 17th Biennale of Sydney from 12 May to 1 August 2010.
