Asia
Wong Hoy Cheong
Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother
2009
Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother
Created for the tenth Lyon Biennale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong Hoy Cheong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that has been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeanness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon—preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.
Born in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong’s work examines the formation of his country’s multicultural identity vis-à-vis global migration, trade, colonialism, and the postcolonial circulation of people, ideas, and capital. His extended body of work uses various media—drawing, painting, performance, installation, video, and on-line projects—to critique the impact of these developments on contemporary life within and without South Asia. With the increasingly hegemonic domination of the media industry in everyday life, its systems of representation have become a central issue in Wong’s recent work, which oscillates between reality and fiction, irony and transgression—and gains a new strength in the process.