Liang Ming Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Four Malay Stories was commissioned in 2006 by Esplanade (Singapore) Visual Art Team under the exhibition titled Labilabu, and it was created in collaboration with curator/artist Khairuddin Hori. Both Ming and Khairuddin had treated the cinematographic films directed by the iconic mid-20th century Singapore/Malaya actor, director and songwriter, P. Ramlee as archival materials which than ‘re-interpret’ and ‘re-evaluate’ by both artists in exploring the multiplicity of relational activities by the different racial and ethnic groups in the Malay archipelago before independence and the forming of the nation-states. My arguments within this paper are twofold. First, I would like to argue against the westernization of Ming Wong’s art practices, which most scholars have argued that it has been developed from western artistic practices and aesthetic. I will argue that Ming Wong has developed his perception of artistic practices within the paradigm of a situated and localized context of Singapore as a vernacular cosmopolitan and creolized island which than transformed into a regime of a Multicultural nation-state by the People Action Party led by a team of Creole Chinese elites such as Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee. Secondly, Four Malay Stories reflects the multiple nationalism and its diverse consciousness form by the leftist Chinese as the left-wing Cosmopolitanism, the nationalist Malays that form the Muslim cosmopolitanism and the multicultural and elites cosmopolitanism, which formed by the People Action Party. These multiple nationalist ideologies and consciousness have created static identities that erased the Creole identities that had developed within the Island of Singapore for centuries. Ming Wong and his re-interpretation, re-evaluation and re-enactment of P. Ramlee’s film characters will tells us the multiple power relations that had been intersecting with each other and it is Ming intention to draw all these together in his performance of multiplicity.
Liang Ming Wong graduated from the Master of Cultural Management programme from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011, and played an active role in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong art scenes for several years prior to his PhD studies. From 2007 – 2010, he was working as Management Assistant Officer at NUS Museum, a museum focus on regional art and culture at the National University of Singapore. At present, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural and Religious studies, CUHK working on his dissertation on Cosmopolitan Subject in Artistic Practices: The Cases of Southeast Asian Artists from the Malay Archipelago. His Ph.D. research focuses on tracing the worlds of a small, but significant group of Southeast Asian artists who have lived and continue to create works mainly outside of their place of birth origin. Specifically, his research engages with the relation between the diversity of the artists’ creative practices and deals with unique frames of reference towards concepts of: memory, belonging and displacement thereby pertinent to the current discourse on cosmopolitanism and post-colonial debates on transnational artists who are from Southeast Asia.