Born in 1971 in Singapore, Ming Wong lives and works in Singapore and Berlin. Wong, whose practice explores the performative veneers of language and identity through the moving image, often plays a mélange of roles for the camera, donning the plural personas of actors, actresses and their screen parts, at other times assuming the director’s chair. Wong who has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Singapore and Sydney, has exhibited at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2009) and participated in group exhibitions at several international biennales.‘Life of Imitation’ represents a cinema billboard designed by Wong and hand-painted by Neo Chon Teck, Singapore’s last surviving billboard painter. ‘Imitation of Life’, the 1959 melodrama by Hollywood director, Douglas Sirk, provides the basis for ‘Life of Imitation’, which reworks a pivotal scene. In this work, Wong revisits the multi-ethnic film industry of pre-1965 Singapore with more than the aim to present the context of the golden age of cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.
