Ming Wong

Single-channel video,
costume made of painted fabric,
transcriptions of speech by
Chinese President Xi Jinping
14:36min

Sunu Jappo / 手拉手 / Hand in Hand is a video poem that sees the artist take on the persona of a cultural ambassador revisiting the sites of Sino-Senegalese ‘friendship’ built with Chinese aid.

Inspired by the 2018 opening of the Museum of Black Civilisations, Wong organised a research trip to Senegal with the Chinese curators Xia Yanguo from Beijing and Enoch Cheng from Hong Kong under the auspices of Goethe Institute’s project “Migration Narratives in East and Southeast Asia” in 2018/2019. The museum, a symbol of decolonisation and of Black identity was first proposed by the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, who served as the first president of Senegal (1960-1980), as part of his vision of a postcolonial pan-Africanism. While Senghor believed that culture was at the heart of development, his museum was only accomplished 50 years later with the help of Chinese aid.

While recalling the form of televised trips by cultural delegates between Africa and Southeast Asia (as presented in this exhibition), Wong’s video, unlike such political performances, is reflexive of its ‘anthropological’ gaze and the position of a Chinese cultural ambassador surveying a client state and an ‘Other’ culture. Wong describes the video as “a tribute to Trinh T. Minh-ha's positioning against the colonising gaze: ‘I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby.’” Minh-ha made her first film, Reassemblage (1982), in Senegal.

Unscripted and made without any explicit narrative, the video is constructed from fragments of sounds and images that Wong collected with the two curators. The video’s soundtrack of a Senegalese student’s Chinese speech competition, Wong’s camera capturing a banner that states the museum “re-reads the past in consideration of new configurations,” and children rushing to shake Wong’s hand are all chance encounters that constitute the video.

While Wong’s video illustrates the negotiation of gazes and performances that underlies cultural diplomacy, his cultural ambassador is also a cipher gesturing towards the historical trajectories that are being re-mobilised today. Apart from being home to the Museum of Black Civilisations, Senegal was the first West African country to join the Chinese government’s One Belt One Road Initiative and was the first stop for President Xi Jinping’s tour of Africa in 2018.