Asia

Wong Hoy Cheong

Days of Our Lives: Reading (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s Le Lecture, 1877)

2009

Days of Our Lives: Reading

Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work that was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by artist Wong Hoy Cheong. It marks a new dimension of his ongoing effort to negotiate with the postcolonial reality across the world, with a unique interventional strategy to deal with French society. Named after a soap opera in the U.S. which has been running practically everyday for over 40 years, Days Of Our Lives is a series of six photographs which explores this new Europeanness. These reenacted photographs or tableaux vivant are based on the French painting section in the Museum of Fine Arts (Lyon) which depict domestic scenes: preparing food; relaxing, reading and playing music; giving charity to the poor or being evicted from home or going off to war. They are paintings of ordinary people and their everyday activities and problems.

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.

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Wong Hoy Cheong Days of Our Lives: Reading (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s Le Lecture, 1877)

Wong Hoy Cheong

Days of Our Lives: Reading (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s Le Lecture, 1877)