March 21 until May 16
Ming Wong
«Eat Fear»
-
Ming Wong on Fassbinder
I first came across Fassbinder’s films when I was a young art student in London, at the cinema at the ICA. This was in the late 1990s. Without knowing much about Fassbinder beforehand, I entered, fully unprepared, the world of «Petra von Kant.» For the next one and a half hours, I didn’t blink. Lost in a world where only histrionic women existed, I was touched profoundly forever. I didn’t understand the German language at the time, but I understood her exactly. I was Petra von Kant. Later in the same season, I watched «Angst essen Seele auf» (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1973). Emmi and Ali stole my heart. I shared their sense of injustice and I cried for them.
Several years later, I relocated from London to Berlin. In the months preceding the move, I created «Learn German with Petra von Kant» (2007), my self-designed cultural and linguistic «integration course» in which I adopted Margit Carstensen’s performance as my model for speaking, moving and looking like a German. Phrases like «Oh Mann, ich bin so im Arsch» (Oh man, I am so fucked), «Du ekelst mich an» (You disgust me), «Meinst du, mir liegt was an dir?» (Do you think I care about you?), «Wenn Ihr wüßtet, wie dreckig Ihr seid» (If you only knew how filthy you are) I can repeat, with gusto. Believe me; they have served me well during the time that I have been in Germany.
I spent the first year in Berlin on an artist residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, located in Kreuzberg – home to punks, bohemian artists and the biggest Turkish population in Germany. I called myself a Gastkunstarbeiter, one of many of a generation of «immigrant artists» flooding into Berlin. Interacting with my neighbors as a new arrival, the themes from «Angst essen Seele auf» seemed freshly relevant, and the film became the basis of my project that year, entitled «Eat Fear» (2008) – in which I re-enacted scenes from the film, playing all the roles, speaking my bad German.
In my film, it wasn’t just Ali who spoke «broken German» like a foreigner. The other characters’ xenophobic outbursts were voiced in deliberate foreign tongues; the Germans in the film became foreign unto themselves.
As my own art practice evolves, I continue to find parallels to Fassbinder’s world, in which his colleagues in filmmaking became «family,» and the boundaries between «real» life and «work» are blurred. In more recent projects, the making of the film becomes part of the film itself, where the artist making the work becomes an intrinsic part of the work. Life, theatre, art collapses. The art is but an extension of the artist’s existence.
This year marks the seventh year since I moved to Germany. I still speak German like Ali. If I survive to the tenth year, I will mark the anniversary of my «Germanness» with a second rendition of LERNE «Learn German with Petra von Kant» and «Eat Fear.» Will I come across as more German? Or will more Germans be like me? In our collective cinematic memory, Emmi and Ali continue to struggle on, fighting a fight that is no less relevant in Germany today than it was in 1974. What can I do but to «eat» my own «fear?»
Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF, Frankfurt am Main and the Rainer Fassbinder Foundation (Ed.), Ming Wong on Fassbinder. – Fassbinder NOW, Film and Video Art. Berlin, 2013, pp. 266–269.
«Learn German with Petra
von Kant»
Single-channel Video Installation
10 min. loop, 2007
This work was developed by the artist as part of a personal, self-designed German language and cultural immersion program, while he was preparing to relocate to Berlin in August 2007. Believing that one of the best ways to gain insight into a foreign culture is through the films of that country, the artist adopted one of his favorite German films as his guide – Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film about a successful but arrogant fashion designer in her mid-thirties who falls into despair when she loses the woman she loves. Putting himself in the mold of German actress Margit Carstensen as Petra von Kant – a role for which she won several awards – the artist attempts to articulate himself through as wide a range of emotions as those displayed by the actress in the climactic scene from the film, where our tragic lovesick anti-heroine goes through an hysterical disintegration. With this work, the artist rehearses going through the motions and emotions and articulating the words for situations that he believes he may encounter when he moves to Berlin as a post-35-year-old, single, gay, ethnic-minority, mid-career artist – i.e., feeling bitter, desperate, or washed up («Ich bin am Arsch»). With these tools, he will be armed with the right words and modes of expression to effectively communicate his feelings to his potential German compatriots.
«Eat Fear»
Single-channel Video Installation
27 min. loop, 2008
During his residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Ming, who was inspired by the strong Turkish presence in Berlin’s Kreuzberg area, developed his latest video work, «Eat Fear,» a reconstruction of a Fassbinder movie, «Angst essen Seele auf» (1973), which tells the story of Emmi, an elderly cleaning woman from Munich, who falls in love with a much younger Moroccan immigrant worker named Ali. The two unlikely lovers start living together as a couple, which at that time in Germany was socially looked down upon, if not deemed downright scandalous. In Fassbinder’s film, their relationship threatens to turn into a disaster under the pressure of hostile and discriminatory social reflexes. In «Eat Fear,» Ming plays all the roles, female and male. Speaking an approximate German, he embodies up to five persons at the same time, relentlessly switching between various identities, defined by gender, age or nationality. By playing all the protagonists in a wholly unfamiliar language, Ming redirects the arrows of antagonism back onto every single one of the characters, thus turning each figure into an «other» or a «stranger.» Beyond a reflection on identity and alterity – a topic which is at the heart of his artistic project – Ming’s works are enlivened by a deeply funny and entertaining dimension, which helps reveal the positive options unlocked by a playful state of «in-betweenness»– in-between ethnicities, languages and genders.
Director of Photography:
Carlos Vasquez
Production Assistants:
Jungju An, Sonja Schmidt
Make-up:
Julia Lohmüller, Katrin Wespel, Lyn Kato
Supporting Actors:
Kate Fulton, Hermann Heisig
Stills Photography:
Anja Teske, Job Janssen, Anouk Kruithof
Ming Wong Born in 1971 in Singapore, lives and works in Berlin. He participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009, in the Singapore Biennale 2011, Sydney Biennale 2010, and Gwangju Biennale 2010 and in the Liverpool Biennial (UK) 2013. In 2013 he had solo shows at Shiseido Gallery (Japan) and at the Centre d‘Art in Neuchatel (Swiss). At present, Ming Wong has a comprehensive exhibition at the Minsheng Museum of Art in Shanghai (China).