Angst Essen/Eat Fear and In Love for the Mood

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2010

Angst Essen/Eat Fear
Ming Wong
2008
27 minutes
Digital video installation

In Love for the Mood
Ming Wong
2009
4 minute loop
3 channel digital video

Originally commissioned for the 2009 Venice Biennale for the artist’s solo exhibition Life of Imitation at the Singapore Pavilion, In Love for the Mood is inspired by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s meditation on love and infidelity, In the Mood for Love. A Caucasian actress plays both the leading man and woman and attempts to deliver the lines in Cantonese. Her faltering line readings are recorded in three loops, played simultaneously on three screens. Angst Essen / Eat Fear is a compressed remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s intercultural melodrama Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Wong himself plays all the roles, including the Moroccan male and German female protagonists. Amazingly, these remakes successfully convey the precise emotional language of the original films. Too discomfiting to be camp drag, they raise vexing questions about race and gender representation as it relates to narrative expectation. They also display an effusive love for cinema and its heroines that is hard to resist.
—Noah Cowan