{"id":1175,"date":"2021-08-20T00:24:37","date_gmt":"2021-08-19T16:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1175"},"modified":"2021-08-16T12:27:46","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T04:27:46","slug":"wong-ping-creates-videos-imagining-phantasmagorical-worlds-unbound-by-social-mores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/wong-ping-creates-videos-imagining-phantasmagorical-worlds-unbound-by-social-mores\/","title":{"rendered":"Wong Ping Creates Videos Imagining Phantasmagorical Worlds Unbound by Social Mores"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around two years ago,\u00a0<\/b>Wong Ping<\/a>\u00a0took an interest in varicose veins. Bored one day while riding an elevator, he noticed them on a passenger\u2019s legs. \u201cI could see them very clearly,\u201d he said from his Hong Kong studio during a recent Zoom interview. He began researching online, reading about gels that alleviate the discomfort they cause. What would it be like, he wondered, to be a varicose vein?<\/span><\/p>\n

That inquiry wound up forming the basis for Wong\u2019s latest video, which debuted this past June in his first United States survey exhibition, at the\u00a0New Museum<\/a>\u00a0in New York. His practice involves applying dream-world logic to real-world scenarios. \u201c[I\u2019m] interested in something that\u2019s a mixture of weirdness and the real world, or something out of this world happening in real society,\u201d he said. \u201cA mixture between [here] and somewhere else, maybe something happening on some other planet. It gives this impression to people that it\u2019s not real \u2026 [but] everything is from my experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Already a sensation in Hong Kong, where he was born and is based, Wong, 37, is known for making oddball animations that enact uncomfortable<\/a>\u2014and occasionally beautiful\u2014blends of sexuality and violence. Masturbation, genitalia, and mutilation are staples in Wong\u2019s work, but so too are animals with strange, oddly human anxiety. Populated with flat, schematic, and brightly hued figures, these animations envision worlds unbound by the social mores that govern society as we know it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past five years, solo shows at venues like the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland and the Camden Arts Centre in London have given Wong\u2019s taboo-testing work wide exposure on the international art circuit. He has come a long way from the days when people generally came across his videos randomly online. But unlike many artists with similar reputations, Wong does not have a studio team\u2014for fear, he said, that his animations would turn out too polished. \u201cYou know, when I ask people for help, their skill would be, like, too good for me,\u201d he said. Instead, he works solo from his Hong Kong space, and much of his work is done on his laptop using software like Illustrator and After Effects, Adobe programs that are commonly used in film and television post-production.<\/span><\/p>\n

In common with many artists who work chiefly on computers, Wong\u2019s studio hardly looks like a studio at all. Wong had reorganized the space following Lunar New Year festivities two days before our conversation. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of super messy at the moment,\u201d he said. Except that it wasn\u2019t\u2014his light-filled apartment overlooking a set of factories resembles a clean, orderly office, with a workspace near a window, some comic books nearby, and a place to sleep when he chooses to spend the night.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Still from Wong Ping\u2019s\u00a0Fables 1<\/em>, 2018.<\/span>COURTESY EDOUARD MALINGUE GALLERY, HONG KONG AND SHANGHAI, AND TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Wong rarely has a completed<\/b><\/a>\u00a0screenplay at the ready when he makes a video. He starts out by composing vague scripts while hiking through Hong Kong\u2019s picturesque mountains, far from his studio. \u201cI need to go out to write, to think,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen it\u2019s almost done in my head, I can have the patience to sit down [and animate].\u201d (He refers to that later stage as \u201cthe boring, repetitive animation part.\u201d) The scripts germinate from his associating unlike ideas. The idea of being a varicose vein obsessed him to the point of distraction; when he was late filing a regular column he writes for a literary magazine,\u00a0Fleurs des Lettres<\/i>, he told his editor that he was trapped in a vein. He started linking the veins to memories of fishing with his friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Objects in Wong Ping\u2019s studio.<\/span>KITMIN LEE FOR ARTNEWS<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

With a mostly completed screenplay in hand, Wong begins digitally drawing in Illustrator, which allows him to create images that appear flat. The process, he said, is akin to \u201cdoodling.\u201d Then he imports these files to After Effects, a program typically harnessed by video game designers and visual effects studios to create high-tech imagery. In Wong\u2019s hands, however, the results are intentionally a little amateurish\u2014the motion isn\u2019t smooth, and the overall look isn\u2019t polished. For the varicose vein video, he fused the images he\u2019d been thinking about to create the film\u2019s first shot: a scene in which an older saleswoman\u2019s varicose vein becomes a lake (from those fishing memories) that entraps a man, a stand-in for Wong. She then leads him to a staff restroom, where the male protagonist massages her leg in an attempt to escape. Crucially, he works from inside her body, literally trying to bring what is going on within her out into the world. \u201cI think people could be really opened up,\u201d Wong said, \u201cto be really honest with themselves<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Many artists of Wong\u2019s generation\u00a0<\/b>have drawn their inspiration from the internet, where there are more hours of entertainment available than any single person could ever consume. But this wasn\u2019t the case for Wong, who didn\u2019t watch many movies or TV shows growing up or spend much time online. Born in the mid-\u201980s, he was instead influenced mainly by comics and anime, the latter passion inspiring his schoolmates to label him\u00a0otaku<\/i>\u2014the Japanese word for a nerd with an obsession for cartoons.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wong Ping\u2019s Hong Kong Studio.<\/span>KITMIN LEE FOR ARTNEWS<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

After Wong graduated from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, in 2005, he found himself unable to put his bachelor\u2019s degree in multimedia design to use, so he took jobs in a printing factory and in the post-production department of a Hong Kong studio that produced B-grade TV series. Bored by the work, he began playing around with After Effects to make his earliest animations.<\/span><\/p>\n

A breakthrough came in 2011, when Wong made a music video for his friends\u2019 band, No One Remains Virgin. Accompanying their song \u201cUnder the Lion Crotch,\u201d the video provides the first mature vision of Wong\u2019s phantasmagorical world via an homage to the Lion Rock, an iconic mountain in Hong Kong that looks like a crouching animal. But rather than lending the peak a sacred, transcendental feeling, Wong offers up a profane universe in which the Lion Rock is a living, breathing thing with a giant penis. Among other antics, the mountain preys on four balding people jumping rope, two of whom wear shirts reading\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>I\u2764\ufe0fHK. Two of them die a gruesome death when the lion, by some mysterious means, makes their heads explode, spraying blood everywhere. The other two masturbate the lion, the results flooding Hong Kong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though less obvious to those outside the region, the video demonstrates a political tendency in Wong\u2019s art; he was involved in the Hong Kong protests against a proposed extradition bill. \u201cI would say in every single work of mine, I try to talk about it a little bit,\u201d he said. Politics, he said, \u201cplays a huge part in my work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Objects in Wong Ping\u2019s studio.<\/span>KITMIN LEE FOR ARTNEWS<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Wong has continued in this mode with his ongoing \u201cFables\u201d series, which he described as fairy tales for our digital age. In the first video, exhibited in the New Museum Triennial in 2018, a chicken police officer with Tourette syndrome kills civilians, a pregnant elephant prepares for a second act as a Buddhist nun, and an anthropomorphized tree lives in fear of cockroaches (as does Wong himself<\/a>). Applying logic to these videos won\u2019t make them cohere, a fact that Wong underlined when he submitted the following description for the Sundance Film Festival screening of the second \u201cFables\u201d video: \u201cWong Ping urinates twice before gently pressing your head down with his right foot, giving you a closer look at your own reflection in his urine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as his work gets endorsed by museums and galleries around the world, Wong sometimes misses the days when his audience was mainly curious online viewers who weren\u2019t necessarily aware that they were looking at art. \u201cWhen people visit a gallery or a museum, they have expectations\u2014they read about you, they heard about you, they saw the posters,\u201d he said. \u201cBut when I show my work on the internet, I get comments with people saying bad things about me. You know, I really enjoy that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around two years ago,\u00a0Wong Ping\u00a0took an interest in varicose veins. Bored one day while riding an elevator, he noticed them on a passenger\u2019s legs. \u201cI could see them very clearly,\u201d he said from his Hong Kong studio during a recent Zoom interview. He began researching online, reading about gels that alleviate the discomfort they cause. 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