‘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.

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.

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 Chinatown (1974) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (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.’

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: Wayang Spaceship (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.

‘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 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 fusing them with traditional Chinese theater. Everything links back to theater and Chinese opera, in particular Cantonese opera,’ he explains. The stories were adapted to both 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.

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 Windows On The World, Part 2 (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 Part 1 a riff on both Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, Wong plays a female astronaut wearing an oversized, spherical helmet, wandering tentatively through a Kubrick-esque tunnel to the sounds of Cantonese opera.

Yet another thread of research has to do with Nixon’s visit to China, which happened 50 years ago this year. Running for two nights at the Berliner Festspiele in late January will be Rhapsody in Yellow, a musical lecture-performance on a proscenium stage in which two pianists improvise a dual rendition of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and the Yellow River Concerto, composed by Yin Chengzong during the Cultural Revolution. ‘Mao commissioned it because they had forbidden Beethoven,’ says Wong. Set up as a face-off between the two musicians, but also including narration and documentary footage of 20th-century musical evolutions in China and the US, as well as Nixon smiling with a gray-haired Mao, the piece premiered at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria, in 2022. According to Wong, it’s ‘like watching a table tennis tournament with pianos instead of ping-pong tables.’ But it’s also a comment on how the Eastern and Western superpowers have drifted even further apart in the past half-century.

After almost a decade in London, Wong first came to the German capital for a yearlong residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien around the corner from his current base. In 2009 he won the Special Mention (Expanding Worlds) award for his exhibition ‘Life of Imitation’(the main component being a multicultural riff on Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life) at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – his first big break. In 2010, he began spending longer research periods in Hong Kong and mainland China. ‘It was like being caught between different systems,’ he says of the dramatic changes in both places – turbo-gentrification in Berlin, and in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 and ongoing political tensions. Now Scandinavia is also in the mix: Wong has been Professor of Performance in the Expanded Field at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm since September 2019. The itinerant existence suits the artist, who says he’s been an imposter, a middle child, or a code-switcher for most of his adult life. Appearing in what he’s called double drag, being a triple agent has long been his thing.

Wong looks around the room, which he’s recently cleared out to accommodate a desk for a young artist colleague from Bangkok and another for his film editor. ‘We have to move out next year,’ he tells me. The building was recently sold. In Berlin as in many other Western cities, studio displacement is an old, common story. Wong isn’t sure where he’ll go, but he’s not worried. There’s more to do in Hong Kong (where he’s not been since the pandemic started), and in Stockholm he’ll have access to space and equipment at the university. In Berlin he’ll just need a space to think. ‘So much has happened in this room,’ he tells me as the film shoot gets louder in the adjacent kitchen. ‘But it’s time to go.’

Ming Wong is represented by carlier gebauer (Berlin, Madrid) and Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou, Beijing). He is currently part of the collective exhibition ‘Empowerement’ at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg until January 8, 2023; his installation Wayang Spaceship is on view at the Singapore Art Museum until January 31, 2023; and his work Windows On The World, Part 2 (2014), will be on view as part of ‘Signals: How Video Transformed the World’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opening in March 2023.

Kimberly Bradley is a writer, editor, and educator based in Berlin.

All images: Ming Wong in his studio in Berlin, 2022. Photographs by Mizuki Kin for Art Basel.