Ming Wong
Fata Morgana (I)

Artspace presents a major new site-specific commission by Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong, realised in collaboration with artist Liam Morgan. This project marks a significant institutional commission in Sydney, and introduces a new chapter in Wong’s ongoing exploration of Cantonese opera cinema as a technology of transmission, producing speculative temporalities through which cultural imaginaries circulate, fragment, and persist.

Fata Morgana (I) evolves from two significant prior projects: Vast Ocean, Endless Skies, 2025, first presented in Vancouver, and Wayang Spaceship, 2022, commissioned by Singapore Art Museum as part of The Everyday Museum public art initiative.

Drawing from these earlier works, the new commission rethinks traditional Cantonese opera forms through questions of identity, advancing speculative representations shaped by migration and technological transformation. Created specifically for the architecture of the Void Space, the work is suspended from the ceiling and extends vertically; a constellation of articulated bamboo culms is punctured by LED light nodes and mirrored LaserDiscs sourced from 1990s science-fiction films, refracting ambient and programmed light; sound and moving image emanate from embedded 3D fan holograms. The installation connotes navigational mirages of inverted worlds floating in the air due to the bending of light.

Situated at the intersection of cinema, installation, broadcast technology, and diasporic media circulation, Fata Morgana (I) operates as a medium through which other possible worlds are not projected into the future, but sensed within the present.

Like Vast Ocean, Endless Skies, and Wayang Spaceship, the new work operates as both stage and signal: a hybrid narrative environment where popular music, Cantonese theatrical traditions, and science-fiction imaginaries intersect. Here, meanings shift with accent, playback device, and listener. Wong re-edits, reinterprets, and re-performs pre-existing cultural materials as part of an investigation into cultural identity, representation, and the long migratory development of cinema from southern China. In doing so, the work proposes an alternative to Western cultural models that locate identity within stable geographies and singular origins.

Free entry.