<p>長期以來，紐約北部地區一直是藝術家的靈感源泉，這裡充滿了新舊藝術活動，並且正仔細審視自身的傳奇歷史</p>

Sophie Landres

紐約哈德遜河谷不斷發展的藝術概念有何獨特之處？ 

<p>‘My studio has always been in Kreuzberg,’ artist Ming Wong tells me, referring to his 15 years in the rough-and-tumble Berlin district. His airy, white, windowed space sits within a communal gaggle of rooms in a fourth-floor apartment called Muscle Temple, and today, a Sunday, his studio mates are shooting a film in a delightfully messy kitchen. It’s a happy, busy place, and I feel like I’ve stepped back in time to the underground camaraderie of 1990s Berlin – even if the Singaporean artist only came here in 2007. </p><p>Stacked to the ceiling in the studio’s back corner, transparent storage containers filled with colorful fabrics and objects bear labels like ‘Biji Diva,’ and ‘Making Chinatown’ (titles of prior video works), or ‘Undergarments’ (self-explanatory). ‘These are all the costumes, props, makeup, wigs, stuff I use in my work; “Undergarments” would definitely be a section on its own,’ says Wong, laughing. On the walls are collages placing vintage images of Cantonese opera singers into 1960s science-fiction scenarios. Propped on a desk, an illustration shows Richard Nixon and his wife Pat in front of the Great Wall of China; a memento of the then-US President’s visit to China to meet Chairman Mao in February 1972. </p>

<p>The stored costumes are relics of Wong’s oeuvre – many of his video works are campy remakes of seminal scenes from films ranging from Roman Polanski’s <em>Chinatown</em> (1974) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s <em>The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant </em>(1972). In them, Wong plays all or most of the roles, whether male or female (hence the heavy-duty support-wear undergarments); Asian or white; young or old. Conventional identity markers like gender, race, age, and language are thus utterly turned on their heads; the ongoing play with identity could be a reflection of the artist’s upbringing in Singapore, a Southeast Asian crossroads marked by trade, migration, and multiculturalism, where he was exposed to a ‘mongrel cultural no-man’s land’ with pop culture coming from East and West. ‘My reference point is not art history,’ he says. ‘It’s cinema, TV, music. It’s also a questioning: who am I? What’s going on? That’s why I work with moving images.’</p><p>Still, what’s visible around the studio right now – the collages, or sheets of dichroic films that glow in iridescent colors – is more object-based. It is evidence of what will be on view in various institutions in January 2023: <em>Wayang Spaceship </em>(2022) is a site-specific structure that has been installed adjacent to the Singapore Art Museum’s new location on the industrial harbor, ending its six-month run, on January 31. The spaceship mixes the forms of a traveling South Chinese theater (a wooden stage placed on stilts, and usually temporarily constructed for theatrical and opera productions) and a futuristic spaceship. By day the spaceship’s external mirrored walls reflect its industrial surroundings, but at 7:15pm each night the work ‘activates’ with light, sound, and moving images for an hour, its panels lighting up with colors. A solo show opening at Ota Fine Arts’ branch in Singapore on January 7 is where the small collages will land, in the form of enlarged prints.</p>

<p>‘My recent practice looks into the history of cinema from Hong Kong, which is connected to the history of cinema in China,’ Wong explains – his grandfather came from the South Chinese city of Guangzhou. In the 1920s and&nbsp;1930s, Chinese cinema, primarily produced in Shanghai, moved to Hong Kong due to political unrest. Later, in the 1940s, Hong Kong opera troupes made it to Singapore and then across the Pacific to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where they performed in the Chinatowns of those cities. ‘They found Hollywood and brought it back to Asia; adopting storylines, Western musical instruments and scenography, and&nbsp;fusing them with traditional Chinese theater. Everything links back to theater and Chinese opera,&nbsp;in particular Cantonese opera,’ he explains. The stories were adapted to both&nbsp;stage and screen. Wong, who early in his career was also a playwright, has long asked himself what happened to this creative energy through his work. ‘Can we tap into this to look at what’s happening now and into the future?’ he asks.</p><p>Speaking of future, a second thread of Wong’s research is science fiction – less from the west than from behind the Iron Curtain, as well as new science fiction from China. Considering the artist’s oeuvre, it makes sense: sci-fi and speculative fiction are about reimagining societies or identities. ‘Science fiction has been a safe space for Chinese thinkers and writers. In the past, it was the manifestation of anxieties of colonialism. Science fiction has always been a portal in itself for a lot of different things,’ says Wong. He adds that right now, Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital city, is one of the genre’s global hubs, with Chinese authorities even recently announcing the construction of a new ‘science-fiction city’ near there. Sci-fi and opera seem an unlikely pairing. But for the past 10 years, Wong says that he’s made projects that bridge the two. An early work linking the genres is <em>Windows On The World, Part 2 </em>(2014), a 24-channel video which will be on view as part of ‘Signals: How Video Transformed the World’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which opens March 2023. In <em>Part 1</em> a riff on both Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film <em>Solaris&nbsp;</em>and Stanley Kubrick’s <em style="background-color: initial;">2001: A Space Odyssey</em> from 1968, Wong plays a female astronaut wearing an oversized, spherical helmet,&nbsp;wandering tentatively through a Kubrick-esque tunnel to the sounds of Cantonese opera.</p>

<p>根植於連通性，<strong>River Valley Arts Collective（RVAC）</strong>與住所、展覽空間和農場合作策劃展覽，舉辦技能分享工作坊，併為藝術家提供生態材料。 它是在為期一年的實地研究后成立的，旨在繪製和整合文化地形。 創始人兼執行董事<strong>Alyson Bake</strong>r分享道：“有一個連通性是一致的：那便是渴望與自然世界建立聯繫。 無論作品採取何種形式，我們都能聽見景觀、動物、土壤、季節、天氣等方面的體驗...... 這一切都與建築環境所驅動的對話截然不同。 “ RVAC專案的基石是一年一度的”On the Grounds“展覽，在<strong>Al Held Foundation</strong>周圍宏偉的場地上呈現雕塑裝置。 </p>

<p>由於這種社會層面的關注，以前來哈德遜河谷尋求與世隔離的遊客越來越將其視為尋找群體的地方，特別是通過藝術機構提供的服務。 雕塑建築公園歐密國際藝術中心（Art Omi）促進了人們與藝術的戶外接觸，同時通過其駐留計劃將所有創意領域 的國際從業者聚集在了一起。 非營利組織O+意識到美國的許多藝術家都是缺乏醫療保險的臨時工，因此專注於社區的真正福祉。 它優先考慮女性、黑人、原住民、有色人種和LGBTQ+藝術家，通過委託藝術家製作公共壁畫以換取醫療保健服務，同時「拓展了我們對過往誰被允許佔據空間、被看到和被讚揚的看法」。</p>

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