Welcome to the Bamboo Spaceship by Ming Wong

Following the screening of Bamboo Theatre as part of Scenes of (Un-)translatability in September, Ming Wong returns with a cine-event in which he introduces us to a time-space-gender-traveling star of Cantonese Opera Cinema, a unique genre little known outside of Hong Kong. A century ago, opera troupes set out from Hong Kong to travel across the Pacific to the North American West Coast, where they performed in Chinatown theaters for Chinese immigrant communities. They later returned with inspiration and ideas from early Hollywood cinema, thus launching a new hybrid performative 'translation' of Asia & America, tradition & technology. Wong here presents a scholar-warrior who can fight with both brush and sword, who equally dazzles in sequinned armor and pin-stripe suit, and who continues to sing songs of seduction and resistance across the 20th and 21st centuries. (MW)

Ming Wong is a Singapore-born, Berlin-based visual artist who works with cinema and popular culture to explore the construction, reproduction and circulation of identity. His recent performance Rhapsody in Yellow was shown at steirischer herbst '22, Berliner Festspiele, SPIELART Theaterfestival, Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen and the Esplanade, Singapore (2023-24). His works have been shown in exhibitions that include Ten Thousand Suns the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024) and Signals: How Video Changed The World at MoMA in NYC (2023).