Interview with Ming Wong

Travis Jeppesen: Since RHAPSODY IN YELLOW is being presented now at a theatre festival, I thought this might be the ideal time to tell the world about your creative origins in the theatre, since your fans in the art world might not be aware of this facet of your background

Ming Wong: In my student days in high school in Singapore, I had written and adapted plays for the stage and acted in some of them. It was an all-boys school, so that’s where I made my drag debut in public, in a Thornton Wilder play, THE MATCHMAKER. Later on, as a student at the local art academy, I won a national play-writing competition and went on to write several plays which were produced by a professional theatre company. This was in the 1990s, the plays were written in English (or Singlish - Singaporean English - depending on the character speaking) while I was majoring in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. To be honest, I have always been more comfortable in the English language, the studies in traditional Chinese Art were an attempt to reclaim my ‘roots,’ as it were. Writing imagined scenes and dialogues for the stage in various languages and dialects was a release for this restless student forced to do all the routine copy work required in building foundational skills in brush painting and calligraphy. It formed my early understanding of the contradictions and complexities of how identities are performed, through language and representation.

TJ: RHAPSODY IN YELLOW first premiered a year ago in Austria, if I’m not mistaken. Can you tell us a bit about how the work was conceived?

MW: I had made an earlier experimental video work for a group exhibition in Hong Kong in 2018 on the colonial legacy of Western classical music, in which I collaged together film clips that featured the classical music ‘monuments’ of America and China, namely RHAPSODY IN BLUE, composed by George Gershwin in 1924, and the YELLOW RIVER CONCERTO, arranged by a committee during the Cultural Revolution.  The merging of the soundtracks produced moments of surprising complexity and beauty, which gave me the idea to develop a live performance. It wasn’t until a serendipitous meeting a year later with my collaborator, the conductor/composer Henry Hao-An Cheng, that the possibility became real. Being a Taiwanese American, he instinctively understood the potential of the piece. Meanwhile, as I continued to research the historical background of the music and the key characters involved, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels and similarities between the American and Chinese narratives. Thus, the lecture-performance idea was born, and the score gradually developed over meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.
When it came to producing this hybrid work, billed as A LECTURE-PERFORMANCE WITH TWO PIANOS, I knew it could only be possible with a commission from a festival that was a bit more experimental and interdisciplinary - it would not have worked within a traditional classical music framework, for instance. This is where steirischer herbst came into the picture. At the invitation of festival director Ekaterina Degot, we had our premiere in Graz in September 2022, in the framework of their festival theme, “A War in The Distance”.

TJ: When I first saw RHAPSODY IN YELLOW in Berlin, I was surprised because I wasn’t aware of your interest in music.

MW: Working on the score with Henry and our arranger Christopher Schlechte-Bond rekindled my memories of playing the piano as a teenager. My father had won the first prize in a raffle at a Chinese painting art fair in Singapore, which was a made-in-China piano (Hsinghai brand, named after Xian Xinghai, who composed the Yellow River Cantata which the Concerto was based on), and it still has pride of place in our family home.  I used to hate getting graded by the British examiners who were flown into Singapore; my nerves would take over and I never got past grade 6. But I was an avid sight-reader, and I would scour the library for popular tunes to play. I even played the piano solo versions of Rhapsody in Blue, and Yellow River Concerto.
To develop a score that fused both pieces together in their entirety was a nigh impossible task, but I can’t begin to tell you how much the discussions to solve these problems in musical structure and notation sometimes brought on echoes of decolonial theory. Having to create a ‘third space’ in which the two independent pieces could convene on the same page. Inventing completely new (and preposterous) time signatures to accommodate the interweaving of complex rhythms and movements of ‘non-alignment.’  The idea that it was jazz and its un-disciplinarity that allowed for the engagement of the two sonic regimes. The score and exchange of parts between the two pianists became a metaphor for the subtle, and not so subtle, negotiation and its moments of conflict and compromise, accord and aggression, humor, and pathos, between players from the two superpowers. Music takes over where words reach a limit.

TJ: Why did you choose this moment in time to engage with the topic of US-China ‘Ping-Pong’ diplomacy of the 1970s?

MW: Another significant point was that 2022 was the 50th Anniversary of the historic summit between the American ex-president Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972.  The popular myth is that the visit of the US table-tennis team to China a year before paved the way for Nixon’s arrival. The sport of Ping-Pong and its players at the time were instrumentalised to orchestrate one of the most important turning points in modern history, the ramifications of which are still strongly felt today. On the wider level, the themes of how nationalist ideals have been disseminated through culture, the growing tensions in our current globalised society and the complex contradictions occurring within, can perhaps be better expressed not in words but with sound and image. On the personal level, the work encapsulates so much of the inner struggles of a contemporary, transnational artist of Asian descent.

TJ: What’s next for you?

MW: Developing RHAPSODY IN YELLOW has unlocked unfulfilled desires that have come from working in a theatrical setting in the past. It’s as though I have come full circle from where I started, as a writer of plays, re-imagining the world through words and images, hanging out backstage, observing the goings-on behind the scenes. I think we are at a moment when we realise the value of life, communal experiences with artists doing things in the here and now, of sharing the same time and place with others as the art is happening at the point of its creation, of acknowledging with others around you how the art makes its meaning palpable, within that window of shared time and space. For creators, it’s the theatre ‘high’ that hooks you. I miss that.

Travis Jeppesen is the author of numerous books, including WOLF AT THE DOOR, ALL FALL: TWO NOVELLAS, THE SUICIDERS, SEE YOU AGAIN IN PYONGYANG and BAD WRITING. His calligraphic and text-based art work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. In April 2023, his play GHOSTS OF THE LANDWEHRKANAL was premiered at Berliner Ringtheater (direction Ping-Hsiang Wang). In November 2023, Itna Press will publish Jeppesen’s latest novel, SETTLERS LANDING.