Heart Digger
Wong Ping
Camden Arts Centre
5 JULY – 15 SEPTEMBER 2019
Free
I first saw Wong Ping’s work a couple of years ago, where his video Jungle of Desire featured in 180 Strand’s ‘Strange Days: Memories of the Future’ exhibition. Out of all the works present, Ping’s was the one that resonated with me the most, due to his bold originality and audacious affirmations. Ping prides himself on exploring the nature of desires and focuses on taboo subjects as well as gritty realism, mad imagination, and the darn right awkward.
He has just been awarded the Camden Art Centre’s new Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze, which highlights artists exhibiting at London Frieze, rewarding them with a follow-on exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. Darkly comical, the first video installation was titled Dear Can I Give You a Hand? (2018). Depicted in Ping’s typical technicolour animation, it touches on themes of family, dependency, loneliness, and ageing. The video is shown on a large screen, surrounded by hundreds of toy dentures, all complete with mocking grins. The rough 10-minutes makes dry and sarcastic claims such as, “we no longer need the useless caregivers to push us” and complains that the usual Chinese offerings of succulent meats upon death have been “replaced by avocado and kale since society had progressed”.
The mockery of the modern world in this video is most evident, however, when the character informs us of what happens to his dentures after his death “After my cremation, my son puts the gold teeth in my online tomb.” This idea is proceeded with the comical and deeply relatable “they forget the login password” and “My tomb is later robbed by a hacker.” Ping takes the atrocities seen in today’s world, along with certain anxieties we feel, and dials them up by 100, into these mad, creative, but scarily believable concepts revolved around an ever-changing digital age.
It is as if Ping represents the darkest part of our subconscious minds, deep where all the Freudian fantasies and outrageous imaginings go on. Sexually explicit content is his forte, which is most blatantly evident in video Who’s the Daddy (2017). In this second addition to the exhibition, the main character speaks of unruly parental desire. He meets an explorative individual via a dating app, a modern invention where you can be anyone you want to be: he describes himself as a “weekend vegan”. She, on the other hand, likes to be called Mummy whilst being fisted, almost a sexual norm for Ping's style, whilst the protagonist questions why his straight and small penis is outside of the societal confines of normality. This video is in the setting of a darkly lit room, complete with beanbags, cleverly mimicking the setting of a bedroom, thus making you feel complicit in the act, more involved, and - on the whole - hella awkward.
Outside, Ping has created an inflatable giraffe structure (inflatable resonating with many other naughty sexual endeavours – namely the infamous blow up doll). This holds the purpose of apparently helping the “Chief executive and the officials” to “escape the city quietly via the neck as a tunnel which will, over time, naturally decompose”. Nonsense? Yes. Still great? Absolutely. Wong Ping’s works of art are crude, rude, bold and brash. Does that make them weird, wrong, or perverse? I guess it’s the way you look at it. As he asks, at the beginning of Who’s the Daddy, “Is it because I’m a minority of because I live in an uncivilised society?” One thing is for certain: Ping’s works are undeniably entertaining. He’ll always be a genius in my eyes.
OVERALL RATING: *****
Tom and I tried to make the Cork Street exhibition, but unfortunately missed closing on the Saturday (5pm). I would seriously recommend going to see at least one of these exhibitions, both if you can. Ping is also doing a Q&A on Saturday 7th September at the Cork Street Gallery. I’ll be on holiday and gutted to miss it – please go on my behalf.
https://www.camdenartscentre.org/wong-ping-heart-digger/
