Mingcheng Song



October 2021

I view the process of making as an ongoing excavation, the discovery of relics in situ, retrieving pieces from personal experience inscribed with feelings of being less than eloquent, being foreign, being queer. The inscriptions take shape in snippets of encounters and dream sequences informed by specific locales eg. home, school, urban spaces, and statuses eg. a son, a student, a subservient, a potential love interest. Often I find myself confronted by unintelligible objects and interiors that challenge me to construct—both in the sense of crafting sensible narratives, and developing my own lexicon of interests and desires.

My toolbox shelves a number of gadgets and conventions borrowed from different places. When I stage a monologue with objects as characters, I would look to theater for its self-serious and medium-conscious approach to performance. When I write a story or a script, I would listen to the music of Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush for their ingenuity in incorporating storytelling into the constraints of rhythm and melody. I’ve also been working in digital spaces such as Blender, recreating rooms real eg.my kitchen and fictional eg. studio painted by Velaquez, not only as speculation, but also as a way to exert control. My projects end up taking different forms, performance, text, video or sculptures, and they are ultimately united by my investment in constructing structures governed by my own set of rules.