(Left) Wong Hoy Cheong, Reading (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s Le Lecture, 1877), 2009, 112 x 83 cm; (Right) Heri Fantin-Latour (1836- 1904), Le Lecture, 1877)

WONG HOY CHEONG: DAYS OF OUR LIVES

RogueArt assisted Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong with “Days of our Lives”, a project specially commissioned by the 10th Lyon Biennale, with the theme “The Spectacle of The Everyday”.

Named after a soap opera in U.S. which has been running practically everyday for over 40 years, Days Of Our Lives is a series of six photographs which explores this new ‘Europeaness’. These re-enacted photographs or tableaux vivant are based on French painting section in the Museum of Fine Arts (Lyon) which depict domestic scenes: preparing food; relaxing, reading and playing music; giving charity to the poor or being evicted from home or going off to war. They are paintings of ordinary people and their everyday activities and problems.

While these paintings are of the past, their topicality and emotions are still as resonant and relevant today. While the characters inhabiting these paintings are of obvious European descent, the reality has radically shifted. Using models from Europe’s former non Judeo-Christian colonies in Africa, Middle East and Asia, these photographs will instead reprise these “days of our lives” with Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish and Buddhist Burmese minorities. The Judeo-Christian Europeaness of another epoch gives way to a new fluidity and diversity. The past lives in the present, and the present in past as domiciled and naturalized migrant minorities are reconstructing a new Europeaness for this century.

These photographs are commissioned by Lyon Biennale 2009; with the kind permission of Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon and the support of Larson Juhl.

For more information about the 10th Lyon Biennale 2009, do check out their website here