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Wong Ping: Animating the Absurd
Wong Ping: Animating the Absurd
3:36
Video Transcript

(Original language: Cantonese)

WONG PING: I’m not that interested in animation, actually. I seldom watch animation movies. It’s just that animation is a means for me to express everything inside my head.

My work is a reflection of the state of Hong Kong as I create it. An Emo Nose is an example. The paradox of Hong Kong is its intensity, I think. I’m ambivalent about it. This intensive style of life is convenient and kind of warm. But it also impedes daily life. Even though I’m alone while I create, the city is very dense. So when I go out into the crowded streets, I still feel very warm.

Most of my work, actually—maybe 60 percent is about how I’m feeling at the time, or about Hong Kong’s political environment or the living-space situation. So my work is very connected with Hong Kong.

When I was producing Under the Lion Crotch, many of my friends told me to emigrate. Back then, when they encouraged me to leave, I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t leave. At the time I thought I was weak and cowardly. When I recently made The Other Side, after seeing all the change over the years, I realised it’s the same all over the world. It’s equally bad, actually.

Pessimistically, I think: maybe you can’t escape wherever you go, or the world is how it is. So when I look back I wonder, ‘Isn’t my own burden what matters most’? I think this brings me back to the first day I felt like expressing myself through writing or painting. It was with that sense of unease that I wrote my first article, and I’ve been [expressing myself like this] ever since.

There are mainstream singer-songwriters who say, ‘I have to stay in a state of lovelornness to create.’ I think Hong Kong keeps me in this constant state of lovelornness.

Hong Kong is a place that I love and hate at the same time.

Wong Ping

Wong Ping (Hong Kong, born 1984) works primarily in the fields of animation and graphic design. His works are characterised by vividly coloured and stylised animations, combining a child-like sensibility with dark, macabre, psychosexual, and sinister undertones. Cute, loveable characters inhabit surreal, dream-like worlds where absurd scenarios begin to unfold. These fantastical narratives reflect Wong’s personal desires, hopes, and frustrations towards Hong Kong, and allude to various sexual, social, and political issues permeating our daily existence.

Today, Wong Ping is one of Hong Kong’s most promising cross-disciplinary artists. His distinctive visual aesthetic fuses the high and the low, creating a contemporary and unequivocally home-grown form of visual culture.

Video Credits

Produced by

M+

Producer

Kenji Wong Wai Kin

Curatorial Research

Chloe Chow, Tina Pang

M+ Video Production

Lara Day, Chris Sullivan

Special Thanks

Yung Ma, Wong Ping

This video was originally published on M+ Stories.

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