- Composer
- Aaron Drake
- Year
- 2017
- Category
- Films
- Director
- Ming Wong
- Type
- Film
- Status
- Released
- Studio
- Sound in Space
Logline
Making Chinatown by Ming Wong is a remake of Roman Polanski's 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown. According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking. Ming Wong reimagines the seminal Hollywood film as a theatrical study of identity, performance, and geographic construction. In the installation, he casts himself in the roles of the detective (J.J. Gittes), the femme fatale (Evelyn Mulwray), the villain (Noah Cross), and the child victim (Katherine Cross). Key scenes from the incestuous, conspiracy-driven narrative are reenacted in front of digitally printed scenic backdrops that emulate the original 1974 film sets. By inhabiting all characters across gender and ethnic lines, Wong deliberately collapses the original cast's identities. This highlights the racial coding and the "Yellow Peril" origins that historically cast the idea of "Chinatown" as an exoticized symbol of menace and mystery.
Synopsis
Singaporean artist Ming Wong’s Making Chinatown (2012) is a multi-channel video installation that deconstructs Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir classic, Chinatown. Wong exposes the artificiality of cinematic staging and racial casting by performing all four main characters himself. [1, 2, 3]
Score
Original score by Aaron Drake.
Studio Notes
“For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Ming Wong creates a series of videos and scenic backdrops that center around the making of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1974 film Chinatown. Shot on location in the Gallery at REDCAT, Wong’s reinterpretation, Making Chinatown, transforms the exhibition space into a studio backlot and examines the original film’s constructions of language, performance and identity. With the artist cast in the roles originally played by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Belinda Palmer, key scenes are reenacted in front of printed backdrops that are digitally rendered from film stills and kept intact within the video installation. The wall flats adhere to the conventions of theatrical and filmic staging while taking on qualities of large-scale painting and sculpture. Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai and Ingmar Bergman, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures. Making Chinatown is Wong’s first project focused on the American context of filmmaking and draws upon Polanski’s iconic film for its use of Los Angeles as a versatile and malleable character. Wong treats the film as a text through which he is able to inhabit and impersonate the qualities that are particular to the place it represents. Making Chinatown mimics and reduces the techniques of mainstream cinema in order to emphasize the theatrical qualities that underlie cinematic artifice.”
Gallery — 1 image
Credit
Original score by Aaron Drake — a Sound in Space production.