Preface
Since 2018, Wong Weng Cheong has been creating works centred on mutated herbivores in various media, including prints, sculptures, and installations. Above Zobeide was created for the exhibition of Macao, China, a collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The series, comprising three artworks – ‘Above Zobeide’, ‘Above Zobeide – Passersby’, and ‘Wondering in Wilderness’ – is a site-specific work tailor-made for this exhibition. Wong projects his observations of the contemporary lifeworld onto the virtual landscape he began to construct several years ago, metaphorically modelling the shrinking physical and spiritual habitat of our time. Wong presents a desolated urban landscape inhabited by mutant herbivores but not human beings.
As visitors step into the exhibition space, they enter an alien world where distinctions between natives and intruders blur. Live-streaming cameras bring the viewer into the scene, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, visitors and the visited, in this strangely familiar land.