Making Chinatown

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2012

Making Chinatown
Ming Wong
2012

Commissioned by REDCAT, Los Angeles

Ming Wong is among the most sophisticated contemporary artists contending with the history and culture of cinema. Through vigorous re-enactments of famous films, he brings to the fore complex ideas about race, gender and sexuality. His work is oddly shocking—and also very funny. It’s also interested in the deceptive qualities of cinematography and montage; his humour often emerges from the naked brutality of his deconstructed remake, as he satirizes how great filmmakers create meaning in their work by revealing their most devious cinematic tricks.

Making Chinatown is Wong’s most accomplished work to date. A series of backdrops, lifted from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, occupy each room in tribute to the artificiality of Hollywood’s version of Los Angeles. Playing in each room is a video recreating a different scene from the film, but with Wong himself recreating the legendary performances of Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicholson and John Huston. The effect is startling and initially absurd, until the work gradually but insistently reminds us of the ways in which questions of identity continue to haunt our collective imagination.
—Noah Cowan