![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Wong_2011_BijiDiva_Part1_Still_musicvideo01.jpg\")
Ming Wong, BIJI DIVA!, 2011\/2013. Video of performance at \u201eIn Transit Festival\u201c, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Two channel video installation. Video still. Courtesy: the artist, carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou<\/p>\n
Who is there left to for fans of celebrities to idolise? As teen dream Justin Bieber turns into more of a parody of himself every day, who still remembers Beatlemania? And where did it all go wrong?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a sense of nostalgia for these bygone days of celebrity idolisation in Singaporean contemporary artist Ming Wong\u2019s current exhibition at Carlier Gebauer, B\u00fclent Wongsoy: Biji Diva!. The first time that all works in this project have been collected together, the exhibition makes an installation out of Wong\u2019s role play of B\u00fclent Ersoy, Turkish transwoman singer. Photos (created for sleek #31, in fact), video installations and found objects all feature in the show, though the main room of the gallery is taken over by the video of the artist performing songs as Ersoy throughout the stages of her career, at Berlin\u2019s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2011.<\/p>\n
This project is entirely in keeping with the artist\u2019s aim of taking on characters he feels a connection to (a book of newspaper clippings about the singer sits in the antechamber of Carlier Gebauer, collected by Wong). We might think of his replaying of the Fassbinder film Angst Essen, where he plays all the roles, regardless of gender, nationality, age and so on, using only his approximate German. What does it matter that he can\u2019t sound, or even look, like the original?<\/p>\n
His target this time is B\u00fclent Ersoy. She is a pop diva, a household name in Turkey. She took to the stage in her youth as man, as well as while undergoing transition, and later on as a grand dame of Turkish pop music, who just happens to have kept her male forename throughout her career. Though exiled for a period to Germany due to political change in Turkey in the early Eighties, she has been successful for the duration of her life, as evidenced by the vast amounts of memorabilia \u2013 cassettes, record sleeves and posters \u2013 in the exhibition.<\/p>\n
Alongside these material ephemera of Ersoy\u2019s career are reproductions made by Wong, emblazoned with \u201cB\u00fclent Wongsoy\u201d. Having gone to some lengths to imitate the singer, Wong\u2019s collection of covers fit together as a whole, with no distinction other than the change in name to signal which is artist-made and which is an original. It\u2019s as if, fooled by the strong graphical signifiers of font, photography, stylisation, we forget that Ming Wong is an Asian man who looks nothing like B\u00fclent Ersoy. These barriers \u2013 the social categories that Wong seemingly ignores \u2013 are what make the performance so compelling. We are constantly reminded of what is \u201cwrong\u201d with the presentation.<\/p>\n
We also see this in action in the \u201crehearsal room\u201d space in Carlier Gebauer – here we find recordings of Wong learning to sing. He was a bad singer to begin with, apparently, and learning to sing in the classical Turkish style is, well, a challenge. Wong lays bare these barriers to \u201cauthentic\u201d performance, questioning their usefulness.<\/p>\n
At the entrance of the exhibition is an arch with a neon rainbow overhead. The reference is to a Turkish idiom that calls transitioning to a different gender \u201cgoing under the rainbow\u201d. Indeed, once you\u2019ve watched things through Ming Wong\u2019s eyes, it\u2019s hard to go back.<\/p>\n