Wong Ping: 5 Tips for Politely Rejecting a Booty Call from Your Neighbor's Dog: SCAD Museum of Art Savannah, GA

Hong Kong-based artist Wong Ping is known for his child-like animations, sculpture, and site-specific environs that tell unsettling stories of human nature. He began his career in art-making after pursuing broadcasting and cartoon post-production, later founding his eponymous Wong Ping Animation Lab in 2014. The artist's practice is situated between the discords of morality and transgression, surrealism, and political theory, through which he confronts his viewers with the fraught territories of perversion and humanity's base motivations. The artist's narratives are delivered in a paradoxical, faux-naïf style of rudimentary imagery that offsets their profound complexities.

The works in 5 Tips for Politely Rejecting a Booty Call from Your Neighbor's Dog showcases the artist's Fables series in which stories of anthropomorphic protagonists take center stage. Such players include a telepathic tree with a fear of cockroaches, a pregnant elephant that pursues life as a Buddhist nun, and a chicken who becomes a chief inspector of police and unintentionally kills his family. The artist employs a saturated neon palette to light his players, whose absurdist life stories cut to the heart of our mortal experience.

This exhibition continues Wong's exploration of three-dimensional space as a setting for his virtual artworks. His characters dwarf visitors through the grand scale of his projections, which are beamed onto two separate planes that alternate in their activation. This transition of the viewer's focus onto divergent spaces of simulation subtly draws the visitor back into the reality of the gallery space, recontextualizing the viewing experience as a physical act rather than one purely experienced through the total immersion of the flattened omniverse, that which makes up the all-consuming expanse of our digital everyday lives.

Wong Ping's Fables is curated by Ariella Wolens and Ben Tollefson, assistant curators of SCAD exhibitions. It is presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2020, the university's annual program of exhibitions, lectures, and performances held Feb. 18–20 at locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia.