The uncrewed spacecraft Chang’e 6 spent three weeks in lunar orbit before landing on the Moon on June 1, 2024. Tasked with the collection and delivery of specimens to Earth, Chang’e 6 belongs to a lineage of probes launched by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) since 2003, all named after the Moon goddess Chang’e. According to ancient legend, she took her husband’s immortality elixir and ascended to the Moon, whether as an act of defiance or devotion depending on the version of the story. She is accompanied in her eternal residence by an entourage of celestial maidens and a jade rabbit, Yutu, whose name was given to a robotic rover in an earlier Chang’e mission. This lunar deity, a personification of solitude and yearning, has long been a character in traditional Chinese opera and, since the mid-twentieth century, in numerous cinematic productions.
A tapestry of such and similar interplays between mythology and technology is on display in Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 24-channel soundtracked video installation from 2014 composed of flat-screen monitors arranged on three levels of long tabletops stacked like freestanding shelves. This work’s corpus of moving images and accompanying on-screen notes are gleaned from the sprawling archives of Cantonese opera film, East Asian science fiction, and TV news about the role of the People’s Republic of China in what has become of the Space Race.
The collection partially explores the turbulent history of Chinese and East Asian narratives and characters with science-fictional elements, whether found in annals, reports, films, or literature from the late nineteenth century onward. As David Wang has argued, “By the act of imagining and writing out the incredible and the impractical, late Qing writers set forth the terms of China’s modernization project, both as a new political agenda and as a new national myth.”1David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 253. Wang’s italics. The staunch realism of the May Fourth literati, however, meant an aversion to such works of fiction and led to their relatively belated canonization.
Of course, the genre’s position vis-à-vis the Western canon has not been much less ambivalent. In 1941, Wilson “Bob” Tucker coined the term “space opera” to define the popular subgenre that had helped to establish science fiction as a literary staple in the previous two decades. He meant it pejoratively, calling it the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter,” which follows similar designations like “horse opera,” as in a cheap Western, and “soap opera,” as in the radio tearjerkers once sponsored by soap manufacturers.2Bob Tucker, “Depts of the Interior” [sic], Le Zombie 4, no. 36 (January 1941): 8.
Wong, however, takes the label at face value, treating it with irreverence. Instead of rejecting “hacky” and “outworn” clichés, the Berlin-based Singaporean artist uses them as cultural vehicles with high mobility. Divesting from essentialist truth claims, he pursues unprecedented affinities and adjacencies across space and time, reclaiming the hollowness of types, tropes, and clichés as a shape-shifting mold for recasting the history of an unrecognized presence. He turns “opera” into an opportunity to bring together science fiction and Chinese mythology in an arguably queer outer space, working toward the emergence of further hybrid constructs and media offshoots—particularly a Cantonese space opera film.
Wong’s personal history also weaves into his multiyear quest for an exquisite amalgamation of film, media, and performance. He is related to acclaimed opera singer Joanna Wong Quee Heng, who first encountered Cantonese opera in Penang, her birthplace, and later pursued it academically and professionally in Singapore. Wong also wrote an award-winning play as a student in the early 1990s, which led to a theatrical production with elements from Indonesian Wayang and Cantonese opera.
His research into the “opera film” as a transnational genre traces the history of complex and multilayered interactions between Hollywood films, dialect or non-Mandarin Sinophone films, and Cantonese opera performances. The international appeal of talkies in the 1930s transformed performing arts in China, leading to stage versions of popular movies, both foreign and domestic, as well as film adaptations of Cantonese operas.3See Yung Sai-Shing, “The Arrival of Sound, the Sound of War: Ernst Lubitsch and Cantonese Opera Films of the 1930s,” in Exploring Hong Kong Films of the 1930s and 1940s, part 2, Genres, Regions, Culture, ed. Kwok Ching-Ling and May Ng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2022), 248–263. By the mid-twentieth century, this hybridity had been further facilitated through connections developed by opera troupes that sailed from Hong Kong to perform for the Southern Chinese immigrant communities on the North American West Coast. Considering how hybridization both compounds and confronts the differences and divisions from which hybridity emerges in the first place, Wong studies the form of Cantonese opera film not only as a response to the invasive hegemony of Hollywood but also as it was shaped by diasporic and nomadic conditions.
Like a media archaeologist, Wong explores how old narratives of the heavens are retold by new means, and he gathers videographic visions of the world’s expanding future into outer space as imagined and reimagined at different points in the past and from multiple standpoints in and around China. Nonetheless, thematic through lines form the armature that supports the work’s treatment of different media—as much juxtapositional as it is anachronistic. Wong’s approach to locality follows the forms and narratives of dislocation, considering historical discontinuities of a place alongside incredible overlaps between what is no longer there and what is not yet there. The work’s own curated database, much like an index, can serve as a research dossier or study station for identifying various associations between the fictions and realities of future imaginaries, between the unrealized and exhausted narratives of modernization.
In light of the political agendas and national myths that were set in motion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wong collects visual testaments to situated experiments in alternate modernities, whether Chinese, socialist, or both. In this sense, his methodology is tantamount to what could be called “comparative futurism,” charting the conflicts and commonalities between different kinds of “the incredible and the impractical” envisaged through artistic, discursive, and political practices of posterity in different geographical and historical contexts.4See Mahan Moalemi, “Toward a Comparative Futurism,” in Cosmological Arrows, eds. Caroline Elgh Klingborg and Jerry Määttä, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing and Bonniers Konsthall, 2019): 53–63. Comparatism in this sense is fundamentally archaeological; every comparative futurist is required to always historicize the future in its multiple guises. This entails studying how the different progress- and return-oriented approaches to futurity have grown closer and/or more distant from each other over time, or how the technologies of imagination developed by one approach are appropriated and repurposed by the other. The archaeological model of sedimentation reveals to the comparatist that even a newly minted future-oriented thought often carries forward traces of hopes, fears, and ideologies that render it comparable to the accumulated strata of past imaginings.
Given its ethnic, racial, national, and linguistic baseline, Windows on the World (Part 2) particularly situates its comparative lens in relation to what has been referred to under the rubric of Sinofuturism since the 1990s. It is an ambiguous moniker that often stands for a heterogenous constellation of competing ideas. However, by drawing on science-fictional correlations between myth and statecraft, Wong suggests that the presence of Sinofuturist orientations predates the emergence of the terminology and its most emblematic associations today, namely with artificial intelligence or smart cities. For some, Sinofuturism is a techno-orientalist imaginary in which fears and fascinations of a rapidly changing world are projected onto all things Chinese as reductive metonyms for East Asia at large. Its counterpart is another tyrannical sense of the term: a technocratic ideology that drives state policies envisioning China’s future as an ethnonationalist and neocolonial force with a monolithic grip on global capital. Yet for others, Sinofuturism may represent a set of tactics for reappropriating techno-orientalism into an ever-emergent vision with transregional affiliations, navigating a path of futurity between and beyond hegemonic tendencies.5See Virginia L. Conn, ed., “Alternative Sinofuturisms,” special issue, SFRA Review 50, no. 2–3 (Spring–Summer 2020): 66–181; and Ari Heinrich, Howard Chiang, and Ta-wei Chi, eds.,“Queer Sinofuturisms,” special issue, Screen Bodies 5, no. 2 (December 2020): 38–122.
Either way, the Sinofuturist bottom line is that if the future is not so radically new as to erase old constructs of otherness, and if inherited identities remain fictions—because they have never been anything but—then why not fabulate further? Windows on the World (Part 2) frames the future as a dialectic of progress and return, while positing futurisms as the tactics of making do with and without history. It wonders how speculative fabulation might go beyond cashing in on the past or compensating for it, even if history is rife with such maneuvers.
The socialist futurisms in the mix range from Maoist propaganda posters featuring “space babies” to Zheng Wenguang’s pioneering short story “From Earth to Mars” (1954), the first of its kind to gain the Communist Party’s official endorsement. Also included are scenes from Kurt Maetzig’s The Silent Star (1960), a screen production of The Astronauts (1951) by Stanisław Lem, who later distanced himself from his popular novel’s “simplistic moral universe,” seeing it as a result of the period’s constraints.6Philip Hayward and Natalie Lewandowski, “Sounds of The Silent Star: The Context, Score, and Thematics of the 1960 Film Adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel Astronauci,” Science Fiction Film and Television 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2010): 184. The first of several Eastern Bloc sci-fi films, The Silent Star is distinct in its techno-positive pacifism and interplanetary color blindness by way of a multicultural community of crew—perhaps an unsung precursor to Star Trek.7See Evan Torner, “Casting for a Socialist Earth: Multicultural Whiteness in the East German/Polish Science Fiction Film Silent Star [sic],” in The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film, ed. Sonja Fritzsche (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 130–49. This history also revisits the brief years between bans on the genre, when archaeologist Tong Enzheng’s short story “Death Ray on Coral Island” (1978) was adapted by actress and director Hongmei Zhang into the PRC’s first sci-fi film (1980). Finally, Wong’s assortment circles back to the present, marked by the genre’s growing popularity in China since the 1990s and the international rise of Chinese science fiction, particularly those stories set in an extraterrestrial context, since the 2000s.
A key reference among the more recent productions excerpted in Windows on the World (Part 2) is Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), which is part of a lineage of Hong Kong films emerging in the 1980s and flourishing through the 2000s that are often considered an alternative within rather than to the Hollywood mainstream.8See David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and The Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The title alludes to the final year of the fifty-year interregnum during which China and its former British colony are to be governed as “one country, two systems” (although this period feels prematurely cut short following the 2020 national security law). The year 2046 is in the future but also represents a place trapped within the memory walls of unfulfilled desires and unmet promises.
Considering this filmic citation, Wong’s space patchwork seems immersed in a mood of anticipatory nostalgia fused with cognitive latency: in the age of planned obsolescence, extraterrestrial imageries might still momentarily tingle with futuristic flair before turning sourly dated. This is what Ackbar Abbas terms “déjà disparu,” or “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.”9Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 25. Media archaeology can address this cultural politics of disappearance not only by studying the past but also through a historiography of the vanishing present. Media archaeology remediates the experience of becoming aware of something only when it begins to disappear—or of realizing, retrospectively, that it may as well have never existed. Confronted with such prophecies of disappearance, a media archaeologist of the future may be poised to both invoke and intervene in the conditions under which clichés, or memories of what has never been, become self-fulfilling precedents.
Technically an inexhaustible cliché, the lunar soil has long served as fertile ground for stories of colonization, exile, alienation, and physical or psychological transformation, among others. Windows on the World (Part 2) sifts through a large corpus of East Asian cultural productions that reference mythopoetic and technoscientific engagements with the Moon. Among them is Battle in Outer Space (1959) by the kaijū auteur Ishirō Honda, an early non-Western apocalyptic scenario wherein major cities, including those in the West, come under attack by Moon-occupying, mind-controlling aliens. Another is a 2003 recording of the renowned Bai dancer and choreographer Yang Liping’s solo dance Moonlight, in which she fluidly shifts her full-length silhouette between human, animal, and vegetal forms against the backdrop of a large gleaming circle.
Another example of shape-shifting as a motif is Satoshi Kon’s cult anime Millennium Actress (2001), a fictional account of a documentary being made about a reclusive former movie star, which implodes into a dizzying metanarrative conflating biographical facts with her on-screen roles. This fourth-wall-free tour de force follows the actress’s memories of embodying characters in a wild array of films, from period dramas to sci-fi thrillers. In Wong’s selected excerpt, she appears in a spacesuit, boarding a rocket on an ominous solo mission into the unknown—a scene that resonates with other images of predominantly female taikonauts. Among them are Major Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to leave Earth in 2012—who is shown in a postmission TV interview—and Captain Wang Yaping, the second to do so in 2013—who is shown gracefully practicing Tai Chi and teaching physics via a live video broadcast while defying gravity aboard the Tiangong space station.10During the interview, Yang recalls having had dreams about the journeys of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a character from classic Chinese literature, while she was at the space station. See Ming Wong and Kyongfa Che, “Opera Meets Science Fiction,” Tokyo Art Beat, October 10, 2023, https://www.tokyoartbeat.com/en/articles/-/ming-wong-ota-fine-arts-interview-en-202310.
Such thematic focal points—including matters of alienation and longing, adaptation and reinvention, and female or femme representation in historical and mythological narratives as well as in aerospace and entertainment industries—reveal the queer tendencies woven into Wong’s practice. Since the mid-2000s, his oeuvre has involved reenacting iconic scenes from the Golden Age and New Wave canons of film history, with the artist often casting himself in every role. While offering a nod to the long history of female (and male) impersonation in Chinese opera, this approach also suggests a queering of the mutual reinforcement of diversity and uniformity, of segregation and integration, as two sides of the same coin in late liberal globalization.
The artist not only asserts roles that he, as a queer Asian in the diaspora, has been historically excluded from but also challenges assumptions about the historicity and locality of what renders him identifiable. The aim here is to gesture toward global lineages of movement across the assumed borders of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. In his own words, Wong is an “unwilling performer,” challenging “mainstream” expectations for explaining oneself or performing one’s own authentic self: “Double-drags and triple agents; what you see is not always what you get.”11Ming Wong and Wong Binghao, “Small Change: Ming Wong and Wong Binghao in Conversation,” post: notes on art in a global context, August 18, 2021, https://post.moma.org/small-change-ming-wong-and-wong-binghao-in-conversation/.
Via a clip from the video component of his multimedia installation Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014), the artist inserts himself into the grid of (Part 2), where he is walking through a foil-covered, tube-shaped corridor, its oval windows casting an eerie glow. He is wearing a metallic spacesuit with orange details, a high bun with short bangs peeking from beneath a round, oversize helmet, and a stoic expression—somewhat evoking French-Japanese vedette Yoko Tani’s look in The Silent Star. The mise-en-scène echoes that of the Soviet sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky from a 1961 novel by Lem.
Wong soundtracked both (Part 1) and (Part 2) by mixing Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score for Solaris, which was based on a Bach composition, with a 1950s recording of a sorrowful aria from the opera Zhaojun Crosses the Border performed by legendary actress and Cantonese opera virtuoso Hung Sin-nui. This opera narrates the story of Princess Wang Zhaojun’s marriage, arranged as a form of foreign peace treaty during the Han dynasty, and her symbolic role as a “mediator in ethnic and gender conflicts.”12Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, “Wang Zhaojun on the Border: Gender and Intercultural Conflicts in Premodern Chinese Drama,” Asian Theatre Journal 13, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 229. When placed within Wong’s repertoire, her journey of no return reflects how national bodies, always already gendered, remain haunted by a longing born of “estranged futures,” which can offer “passports into queer worlds” through reimagining their aborted beginnings in the past.13Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 162.
Wong’s recombinant approach to customs of crossing or tales of transgression, on the one hand, and futures repeatedly exhumed and exhausted or imagined and abandoned in the past, on the other, is aimed at queering the present—that is, the present as the locus of historical reorientations where our ways of relating to both the past and the future can be reshaped. “Old futures,” according to Alexis Lothian, “are the traces that remain to show that the official narrative is never the whole story.”14Lothian, Old Futures, 12. In this sense, Wong’s ambivalence toward the mainstream brings together a twofold set of vestigial fragments: some represent one of the many narratives of the same story or one of the many renditions of the same narrative, while others suggest shapes of an implied future that never came but still might in one configuration or another.
The grid of identical flat screens—complete with the typewriter effect that animates the artist’s explanatory briefs—evokes not only a control room but also TV sets in a store window, as well as the associated history of forming public spaces in the broadcast image of space travel, among other news. Here, the familiar view of 24-hour news cycle playing in sync across multiple screens has been replaced with an archival display. Deep into the postnetwork era, the contemporary public that Wong calls on too is familiar with the reformatting of diverse source images, daily doomscrolling through so much of it. His audience also knows that while data footprints might be hard to rub off, the digital age has its own culture of disappearance formed around not only encoding losses but also the human inability to retain attention amid mounting information overloads.
For Abbas, writing at the turn of the millennium, disappearance in this sense entails “a radical desynchronization: the generation of more and more images to the point of visual saturation going together with a general regression of viewing.”15Abbas, Hong Kong, 26. The present vanishes into images generated at speeds and volumes beyond perception. Every image becomes a record of an instant relic and then a distant memory of what may never have existed. The past thickens, weighing down on the present, pressing it thin. In other words, globalization has accelerated history to the point that it blurs in places.
A little over a decade into the new century, Wong’s ensemble relocates the matter of ubiquitous disappearance within the increasingly globalizing conditions of the screen age. What characterizes the screen age today is not only the desynchronization of sequential images but also the simultaneity of parallel streams of viewing. More channels, more gaps or divisions—where the specter of disappearance hovers.
What remains in the drift of disappearance is perhaps the impulse to connect—to form longer, layered trails of association across space and time. Simultaneous yet out of sync, a kind of disjointed affinity. This is queer persistence in media mode, seeping from one screen or format into another. The queerness of wayward associations is embedded into Windows on the World (Part 2), which the artist has called an attempt “to open windows into the metaphysical contradictions and cultural clashes of [his] own lived, queer existence.”16Wong and Binghao, “Small Change.” Whether on a screen or in a spaceship, these are also windows through which to navigate the history of the future, its repetitions and discontinuities, in today’s split, multichannel media culture. “Splits function as porous contact zones rather than inviolable borders,” David Joselit writes about early experiments with video, adding that “The split is a navigable space of interchange rather than a void or vacuum into which dialogue disappears.”17David Joselit, “Split Screens and Partitioned Publics,” in Signals: How Video Transformed the World, ed. Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2023), 95. With this archival installation, the artist plants another seed of queer porosity within the split narratives of the past and future. Amplifying the resonance between situated facts and fictions, Wong traces the splintered backstory of a hybrid, imaginative tradition yet to come.
- 1David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 253. Wang’s italics.
- 2Bob Tucker, “Depts of the Interior” [sic], Le Zombie 4, no. 36 (January 1941): 8.
- 3See Yung Sai-Shing, “The Arrival of Sound, the Sound of War: Ernst Lubitsch and Cantonese Opera Films of the 1930s,” in Exploring Hong Kong Films of the 1930s and 1940s, part 2, Genres, Regions, Culture, ed. Kwok Ching-Ling and May Ng (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2022), 248–263.
- 4See Mahan Moalemi, “Toward a Comparative Futurism,” in Cosmological Arrows, eds. Caroline Elgh Klingborg and Jerry Määttä, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing and Bonniers Konsthall, 2019): 53–63.
- 5See Virginia L. Conn, ed., “Alternative Sinofuturisms,” special issue, SFRA Review 50, no. 2–3 (Spring–Summer 2020): 66–181; and Ari Heinrich, Howard Chiang, and Ta-wei Chi, eds.,“Queer Sinofuturisms,” special issue, Screen Bodies 5, no. 2 (December 2020): 38–122.
- 6Philip Hayward and Natalie Lewandowski, “Sounds of The Silent Star: The Context, Score, and Thematics of the 1960 Film Adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel Astronauci,” Science Fiction Film and Television 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2010): 184.
- 7See Evan Torner, “Casting for a Socialist Earth: Multicultural Whiteness in the East German/Polish Science Fiction Film Silent Star [sic],” in The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film, ed. Sonja Fritzsche (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 130–49.
- 8See David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and The Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
- 9Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 25.
- 10During the interview, Yang recalls having had dreams about the journeys of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a character from classic Chinese literature, while she was at the space station. See Ming Wong and Kyongfa Che, “Opera Meets Science Fiction,” Tokyo Art Beat, October 10, 2023, https://www.tokyoartbeat.com/en/articles/-/ming-wong-ota-fine-arts-interview-en-202310.
- 11Ming Wong and Wong Binghao, “Small Change: Ming Wong and Wong Binghao in Conversation,” post: notes on art in a global context, August 18, 2021, https://post.moma.org/small-change-ming-wong-and-wong-binghao-in-conversation/.
- 12Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, “Wang Zhaojun on the Border: Gender and Intercultural Conflicts in Premodern Chinese Drama,” Asian Theatre Journal 13, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 229.
- 13Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 162.
- 14Lothian, Old Futures, 12.
- 15Abbas, Hong Kong, 26.
- 16Wong and Binghao, “Small Change.”
- 17David Joselit, “Split Screens and Partitioned Publics,” in Signals: How Video Transformed the World, ed. Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2023), 95.
