Duration: July 6th (Sat) to September 22nd (Sun), 2013
Location: Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building, Tokyo
Official link: http://group.shiseido.com/gallery/exhibition/future/index.html

Ming Wong presents a film installation inspired by Japanese cinema and traditional performing arts. This is a realization of his long-time desire to spend time in Japan to research and create a work inspired by the richness of Japanese culture. He examines the history of Japanese silver screen from three genre perspectives: “Jidai-geki (historical),” “Gendai-geki (modern),” and “Anime.” He notes that “Western films exist as an extension of photography, whereas Japanese films are more extensions of kabuki, noh, and other traditional performing arts”. In Me in Me, he uses the distinctive performance, camera work, and narrative-setting of these three cinematic worlds to express representative aspects of Japanese film.

For “Jidai-geki,” he uses a flat set that conveys little depth of field, with flat camera work set directly opposite to the stage to capture his kabuki performance as a woman in a classic revenge role. For “Gendai-geki,” he harks back to the golden age of Japanese film greats like Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, and takes Japan’s era of economic boom as the backdrop for showing the struggles of women and the complicated relationships between fathers and daughters. And for “Anime,” he turns to Japanese animated films (like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Metropolis, and Ghost in the Shell) with their characteristic psychological elements, to create the story of an android protagonist on a quest to regain memories of a girl as a high school student. In the style of film trailers, Ming Wong has created archetypal characters of Japanese cinema and performs all of them himself, allowing his own awkward articulations of the lines in Japanese and his own physical characteristics to bring inherent characteristics like gender, age, language, and race into view.