Asia
Wong Ping
An Emo Nose
2016
An Emo Nose, 2016
An Emo Nose is part of a selection of poster-like prints based on Wong Ping’s animated films. They serve as a glimpse into the discourse and intricacy of the artist’s imagined, yet responsive approach to his realities. The series of posters echoes the once-vibrant aura of movie posters, when they were designed by artists and designers to encapsulate the tone, story, and visual style of a film in one large image, and were often as iconic as the movie itself.
An Emo Nose tells the story of a man’s heart-shaped nose that moves away in distance from his face with every negative thought. Akin to Pinocchio’s ‘lying nose’, the man starts off as one with his friend: socializing, enjoying the small things in life from watching movies to meeting women. The nose moves away, however, with every damaging thought till the point where the narrator can no longer see it, just vicariously smells and thereby ‘lives’ through it, leaving him behind to be a social outcast or ‘emo’. Like much of Wong Ping’s work, these posters reflect on the anxiety and aggressions of Hong Kong’s younger generations, presenting a somewhat dystopian prognosis. His narratives tell strange tales that might be difficult to watch, were they not rendered in animated form. The visual and auditory narrations often explicitly touch upon sex, lust, eroticism, politics, and broader social relations. Wong’s video discusses his observations of a society with repressed sexuality, personal sentiments, and political limitations, using a visual language that sits on the border of shocking and amusing.
Obscenity and profound issues of contemporary society are not mutually exclusive in Wong Ping’s video works. His neon-hued animations imagine salacious narratives based on the artist’s real life encounters and observations, tapping into our deepest desires, fantasies, and repressed sentiments. Wong’s work forces its audiences to reassess their internalized standards of decency in its razor sharp critiques and existential inquiries. Teetering between perverse honesty and vulgarity, complex vignettes of individual relations in contemporary society are delivered as lurid, visually vibrant representations in an 8-bit video game aesthetic. Wong’s signature visual language is especially effective in masking social taboos packed with observations on repressed sexuality, obsession, social relations, political limitations, and cultural etiquette. Wong’s work carefully considers immense proposals concerning control structures, desire, sexuality, shame, masculinity, Hong Kong society, and digital ontologies in a way that is neither indexical nor allegorical. Rather, Wing’s work poses an uncomfortable middle ground, equally filled with the uncomfortable dialectic between smut and criticality.