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Ming Wong's Art of Imitation

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Ming Wong's Art of Imitation Ming Wong’s Imitations Barbara Mennel Ming Wong’s Art of Imitation Life of Imitation—the installation prepared by Singaporean performance and multi- media artist Ming Wong for his solo exhibition in the Singapore Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale—restages a pivotal scene from Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk’s famous 1959 Hollywood maternal melodrama, closely replicating its stage blocking of characters, dialogue, and shot composition. Figure 1: Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Source: Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009; two channel video installation Courtesy: carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Full Clip: http://transit.berkeley.edu/2014/mennel-2/ In Wong’s double projection, the three Singaporean actors Sebastian Tan, Moe Kasim, and Alle Majeed—each a member of one of the country’s dominant ethnic groups (Chinese, Malayan, and Indian)—systematically rotate through the female roles of the source material.1 In the key scene from Imitation of Life, the African American maid Annie Johnson, one of the two lead female characters, is visiting her light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane at her workplace in a Los Angeles nightclub. To pass as white, Sarah Jane had previously run away and renounced her mother, who was only able to track her down with the help of a private detective. After a confrontation between the two in a motel room, which ends in a tearful embrace, Sarah Jane’s friend (billed as “Showgirl”) happens to enter and becomes a witness to Sarah Jane’s racial passing, which her mother reinforces by pretending to be her former mammy. 1 This and all other information regarding the individual pieces and exhibitions comes from Ming Wong’s rich website: http://www.mingwong.org/index.php?/project/life-of-imitation/ (Accessed December 16, 2013). Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World © by the University of California, Berkeley. ISSN 1551-9627. http://transit.berkeley.edu/ 2 | Barbara Mennel / Ming Wong’s Imitations Figure 2: Annie visiting Sarah Jane in her motel room after her performance Source: Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life, 1959 Full Clip: http://transit.berkeley.edu/2014/mennel-2/ In Life of Imitation, the male actors cross-dress while performing the melodramatic dialogue with their respective foreign language accents, thus producing different levels of distantiation. They open the scene with an understated acting style that inhibits audience identification and contrasts with the hyperbolic performance otherwise characteristic of the melodramatic genre.2 Yet as the scene continues, their acting increases in dramatic expression and they finally embrace with tearful eyes, shown in close-ups that mimic the original frame composition of Sirk’s film. The accompanying music composed for Life of Imitation by Heathcliff Blair, in very close approximation of the original melodic theme, also heightens the emotional impact of the scene.3 Neither the set design nor the blocking in the double-channel video installation operates in parallel. Instead of moving in the same direction on both screens, the characters each move toward the shared center, and the composition, mise-en-scène, and blocking consistently mirror each other, reproducing the prevalence of mirrors in Sirk’s films.4 In Imitation of Life, for example, key scenes 2 I am retaining the term genre instead of approaching melodrama as “a broad aesthetic mode,” as does Linda Williams (12). Her use of the notion of “mode” allows Williams to situate cinematic “melodramas of black and white,” in a much longer and diverse medial history. Her magisterial account of melodramatic configurations “leaping” from literature, to performance, to musical, to film, and to television is convincing and impressive. However, retaining the term “genre” keeps the focus on distinctions between different media. Discussions of genre in film studies identify correlations among audience expectations, style, narrative, reception, and marketing along gendered lines; for example, the contrast between the masculine-coded Western films and the feminine-coded romance movies. The association between melodrama and femininity shapes my own argument. Scholarship on the melodrama genre has also led to systematic categorizations of subgenres, such as the maternal, domestic, and family melodrama. Also, Wong’s installation explicitly reworks a genre film from the late 1950s. 3 For Heathcliff Blair’s background, see: http://www.themediamusiccompany.com/heathcliff_blair _biography.html. For the score of Life of Imitation, go to: http://www.themediamusiccompany .com/life_of_imitation_heathcliff_blair.mp3 (accessed December 16, 2013). 4 Sirk himself stated: “The mirror is the imitation of life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite” (Fischer 3). Sirk’s predilection for mirrors is widely acknowledged in scholarship on his work. Jeremy G. Butler calls the mirror “Sirk’s trademark” (299). The “Sirkian system” emphasizes surfaces, such as windows and mirrors, but also TRANSIT 9.2 / 2014 | 3 tend to feature characters gazing at themselves in mirrors while delivering central lines of dialogue—an effect Wong replicates in his installation. Two side-by-side projections in a loop of under five minutes are set up with “mirrors opposite two video monitors that refract parallel and never-crossing worlds” in the reenactment of Sirk’s key narrative moment (Fang, 4 of 5). Cuts in each projection coincide with the switching of actors’ roles, making it impossible for viewers to align an individual actor with a particular role, and thereby also destabilizing preconceived notions of race, ethnicity, or gender. In this way, the installation recalls the fantasy of coherent identities Sirk’s Imitation of Life reproduced even while purporting to unravel oppressive racial demarcations. Sirk mobilized the figure of the ‘tragic mulatta,’ a nineteenth-century stock character intended to invoke pity from white readers after the revelation of her ‘true’ identity led to her fall from grace. In classic passing narratives, female characters “are more likely to be punished for passing than are men,” a discrepancy that points to the gendered dimension of the racial passing narrative (Valerie Smith 43). Figure 3: Cross-dressing as Annie and Sarah Jane Source: Installation image; Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009; two channel video installation Courtesy: carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou frames, such as window and door frames, as well as a mobile camera that shoots characters via mirroring surfaces or entraps them by such framing. One of the early key essays in analyzing the Sirk touch was Jean-Louis Comolli’s “L’aveugle et le miroir ou l’impossible cinéma de Douglas Sirk” (The Blind Man and the Mirror or the Impossible Cinema of Douglas Sirk) in a special dossier on Douglas Sirk in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1967. 4 | Barbara Mennel / Ming Wong’s Imitations Figure 4: Rotating actors: Sarah Jane speaking to the mirror Source: Installation image; Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009; two channel video installation Courtesy: carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Figure 5: Remediating the maternal melodrama Source: Installation image; Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009; two channel video installation Courtesy: carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Wong’s double screen does not project two identical versions of the same scene simultaneously; instead it presents two distinct performances that diverge as a result of the actors’ rotations and spoken dialogue, causing both soundtracks to overlap in some instances of the dialogue and diverge in others when individual lines echo each other. The overall sense of simultaneous recognition of and estrangement from the original film’s famously dramatic scene creates an uncanny effect. By remaking key scenes from art films and usually performing all the character roles himself, Wong, I propose, speaks to the identifications and desires that moving image-cultures evoke among spectators in the contemporary context of global and digital media circulation. TRANSIT 9.2 / 2014 | 5 His global work reflects the current technological transformation of art film from celluloid single projection in movie theatres to multiple screens exhibited in spaces such as museums, galleries, and art biennials. Thus, Learning Deutsch with Petra von Kant (2007) is based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), and Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008) restages Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). The film In Love for the Mood (2009) remakes Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), while Devo partire. Domani (I must go. Tomorrow, 2011) rewrites an excerpt of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). Similarly, Life and Death in Venice (2011) reworks Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), and Persona Performa (2011) restages a section of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), whereas Making Chinatown (2012) reflects on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Residing in Berlin, Germany, Wong has shown his installations in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, New York, and Florence, among other cities and, in some instances, he tailored an individual exhibit to its specific geopolitical location. Although Wong’s international stature more recently earned him governmental support from his native Singapore, his oeuvre is more closely aligned with the global diaspora of gay film artists. Directors such as Pasolini or Visconti and films such as Death in Venice or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul have inspired his work, as they have that of others.5 I shall argue that Wong confronts viewers with the practices by means of which different media and aesthetics produce and circulate identity at particular historical moments and across the divides of history and geography. Life of Imitation rewrites the American racial binary of black and white depicted in Imitation of Life and transposes it by casting three actors of Indian, Chinese, and Malayan descent in the roles.
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