This paper examines Singaporean artist Ming Wong and his selected video works that deal with identity, gender and displacement. Wong’s works are concerned with the ways the artist’s body and his queerness inhabit and move across familiar, national and diasporic locations. Wong’s video works re-create different layers of cinematic languages, social structure, gender and identity and his own re-telling of world cinema. In these videos he ‘mis-casts’ himself and other performers by re-interpreting iconic films and performances, sometimes playing all the roles (both male and female) himself, often in languages foreign to him. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Visconti, Pasolini, Douglas Sirk, Ingmar Bergman and Polanski. Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures.

Arthur Laing 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 worked as Management Assistant Officer at NUS Museum, a museum focused 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 Practice: The Case of Overseas Singaporean Artists”.

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