Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor: New Museum, New York

Over the past ten years, Wong Ping (b. 1984, Hong Kong) has developed a highly personal, self-taught style of animation to craft tales of individual desire, societal pressure, and political upheaval. Before his colorful and sometimes disturbing stories of life in Hong Kong received mainstream attention from the art world, the artist worked in television broadcasting and commercial animation. Although his videos may at first recall children’s cartoons, Wong’s work emerges from his own written stories and journals, revealing the aspirations and anxieties of everyday residents of Hong Kong through surreal narratives and a bizarre cast of anthropomorphic characters.

Filling the Museum’s Third Floor galleries, this exhibition will bring together a selection of new and recent work by Wong from across his experimental oeuvre, including Jungle of Desire (2015), a video that tells the story of a homemaker turned sex worker whose exchanges with her police-officer client are voyeuristically observed by her husband.

Other earlier works in the show include, Who’s the Daddy?, a tale of love and parenthood in the digital age; and Wong Ping’s Fables 2 (2019), the second of Wong’s takes on traditional fairy tales in which a variety of creatures learn valuable lessons about living in the complex sociopolitical landscape of contemporary Hong Kong. The first of Wong’s Fables premiered in the New Museum’s “2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage.” The presentation will include the debut of a new video by the artist commissioned for the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, with Francesca Altamura, former Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, the artist’s first, with an essay by Carrion-Murayari; an interview with the artist conducted by Tobias Berger of Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong; and a special contribution by artist David Horvitz.