Wong Hoy Cheong

Audioguide

For this group of studies for his series "Colonies Bite Back", Wong Hoy Cheong collected British textbooks from the late colonial period and fed them to a colony of termites. The insects gorged themselves, leaving the books, which once provided the ideological underpinning for Britain’s colonial endeavours, riddled with holes.

Wong Hoy Cheong grew up in Penang – once a major centre of the British colonial administration in Malaysia. His childhood there continues to influence his artistic work. The issues he explores in that work include the Malays' suffering under Japanese occupation during the Second World War and the process of breaking away from colonial rule prior to independence in 1957. He sees the country as: "Perhaps the most complex multi-ethnic and cultural country in the world".

The tattered pages, which are suggestive of maps, are a meditation on change, implying the disintegration of the British empire and its waning influence on Malaysian culture.