The work of a Singaporean artist moves to center stage during the University of Oregon’s fourth annual Cinema Pacific film festival.
In conjunction with the festival, which runs April 17-21, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and UO Portland’s White Box will feature media installations by Ming Wong.
Wong is recognized internationally for ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. Born in 1971 in Singapore, Wong lives and works in Berlin and Singapore and has enjoyed recent solo exhibitions in New York, China, Seattle and Tokyo.
The dual venue exhibition, “Emotion Pictures,” includes a live Skype performance with Wong on Sunday, April 21, at 2 p.m. in Eugene and Portland.
White Box at the UO in Portland will show “Life of Imitation,” a looped 13-minute double-channel installation. Originally commissioned for the 53rd Venice Biennale Singapore Pavilion, this work is inspired by the classic Hollywood melodrama “Imitation of Life,” in which a black mother meets her mixed-race daughter, who has been running away from her true “identity.” The installation is on view April 4 to May 4; Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” will be screened at 4 p.m. April 21 in the Northwest Film Center, Portland.
There will be a public reception for “Life of Imitation” and Cinema Pacific’s Portland programs on Tuesday, April 16, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the White Box.
Wong’s “Life and Death in Venice” is on view April 12 to June 2 in the Artist Project Space at the Schnitzer museum on the UO campus in Eugene. The three-screen piece revisits Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film version of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.”
Singapore is one of the focus countries of this year’s Cinema Pacific film festival. In addition to the Wong installations and performance, Cinema Pacific is hosting Singaporean filmmakers Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, and Portland filmmakers Steve Doughton and Brian Lindstrom.
-- by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art