Curatorial Statement
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities relates the story of Zobeide and its founding. Men of various nations each dream an identical dream of a naked woman running through an unknown city. Pursuing but losing the woman, when they wake up they search for the city but cannot find it again. Together they resolve to re-build the city, altering their respective pursuits of the woman so that next time she will not elude them. Zobeide, like so many places established through processes of colonisation and globalisation, is a city of desire.
Growing up in Macao, a city developed by waves of ‘foreigners’ from various nations, Wong Weng Cheong constructs a kind of weird pastoral analogue to Calvino’s dream urbanism in his art. Wild and domesticated at once, the sole inhabitants of his landscapes are mutant herbivores with freakishly elongated legs that keep their bodies away from the grassland, their sole food source. Their dysfunctional bodies strive skyward like a living contradiction. Traces of human activity can be seen everywhere in the landscape, indicating the tight bond between civilisation and mutation. Cameras are placed in the scene, as if to monitor, record and study every detail. The visitor becomes a part of the scenario captured by the camera; the viewing subject becomes the object observed. The identity of the viewer as an ‘outsider’ becomes integral to the world viewed.
Wong constructs a landscape of the mind that alludes to the proliferating psychic, physical and existential displacements of our time. At the same time his work is attuned to the implications of the title of the 60th La Biennale di Venezia: ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. Above Zobeide locates itself amid the ubiquitous ‘inclusive exclusions’ (in Giorgio Agamben’s phrase) faced by the subject of mass migration both within and across borders, territories and cultures. In Above Zobeide, the virtual and the actual coexist without any clear border, the citizen and the stranger at once demarcated and indiscernible. As such, the location ‘Above Zobeide’ constitutes what Roland Barthes theorised as an atopia: a site that cannot be described, classified or compared – somewhere completely Other. It is a world above any ‘real’ city whatsoever, a place that continuously appears to be within reach yet continually withdraws from us. A place where everyone and no one really belongs.
In a journey of self-exploration and self-projection, the dimensions and scope of which continue to evolve, the artist has created this work, an extension of a series he began in 2018. For the artist, creating art is a refuge from intense external pressures. Above Zobeide takes this series further into self-analysis. Wong explores his familiar habitat, studying and reframing it from an impersonal perspective. Through the process of deconstruction, the artist’s projected ‘self’ is othered. Like everyone else, the artist himself becomes a foreigner in his fictional world.
Chang Chan