Wong Hoy Cheong

Re: Looking

Re: Looking by Wong Hoy Cheong marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making. The video parodies television networks and documentaries as researched authoritative forms of information. It begins by posing as a serious, believable work of nonfiction, but becomes increasingly unsettling with its inclusion of fictive events, memories, and histories around the urgent contemporary problems of migration, racism, power relationships, and empire making.