{icon-p}
Start
{icon-rundum}
Artworks
{icon-kalender}
Calendar
{icon-mehr}
More
DE
Language
Themen:

117
Wong Hoy Cheong, Study for Colonies Bite Back, 2001

Chapter: Map of Utopia - History, Cartography, Worlds Design

Information

Childhood in Malaysia
Wong Hoy Cheong is a Malaysian visual artist, teacher, and political activist who works across disciplines. His work encompasses drawing, painting, photography, video, performance, and installation, and is shaped by his childhood in Malaysia, a nation he describes as “perhaps the most complex multiethnic and multicultural country in the world.”

Engaging with the legacy of colonialism
Wong studied literature in the United States, including at Brandeis University and Harvard, and later painting. During this time, as he himself has said, he experienced for the first time what it meant to be viewed as an “object rather than a subject.” A central aspect of his practice is the critical examination of the legacy of colonialism, in which he incorporates the complex cultural background of his own family. He is the son of a second-generation Chinese immigrant from a working-class background who married into a wealthy Chinese family.

Termites as art producers
Humor plays a strategic and subversive role in Wong’s work. It serves as a means of confronting the audience with socio-political themes without being didactic. This is also the case in his work Study for Colonies Bite Back, which consists of perforated book pages that are almost falling apart. The holes, however, were not made by humans. For the series, the artist collected British schoolbooks from the late colonial period and had them eaten away by a termite colony. The termites thus become co-producers of the artwork. Without regard for colonial ideologies, the insects gnawed their way through the paper.
The gnawed-through book pages are a meditation on change. They depict a process of dissolution with symbolic power that stands for the collapse of colonialism and for the gradually waning influence of British colonial power over Malaysia.

Gnawing at the ideological worldview
Wong also reflects on the ecological and humanitarian damage caused during the colonial era. The termites literally gnaw at a worldview in which white rulers stand not only above the colonized but above everything on Earth. Wong has long been conderned with the relationship between human and non-human history. In the 1990s, he developed an interest in the migration of plants. This exploration led him to examine human migration, origins, colonization, and Indigenous culture from a new perspective.


Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Study for Colonies Bite Back, 2001
Termite eaten book pages
© Wong Hoy Cheong
Sammlung Deutsche Bank

Further artworks from this exhibition