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Take Wong Ping’s Fables 1 (2018), a pseudo-parabolic trilogy of shorts that sees an elephant fall pregnant, a telekinetic tree trunk agonize over whether or not to inform the abovementioned proboscidean of the presence of a cockroach, and a chicken, who is also a fame-hungry police officer with Tourette syndrome, trigger a massacre. Wong’s work, while masquerading as something sentimental, sweet to the point of being saccharine, is overburdened with messages less subliminal than sickeningly brazen, which together provide a nauseating insight into 21st-century existence: perversion, anxiety, misogyny and avarice, all bound up in a twisted little 2D fantasy. And herein lies the problem, the perversion, the explanation for the 16+ restriction that has been slapped upon Wong’s current exhibition, ‘Golden Shower’, at Kunsthalle Basel. And the folks playing patty-cake? They are, in fact, greying old men, naked from the waist down: the unsettling stars of ‘Under the Lion Crotch’, a music video that Wong produced for the band No One Remains Virgin in 2011. And one of the schoolchildren is smearing an exploded cow’s eyeball over the cheek of her deskmate. Wistfully clunky in its rendering, Wong’s 8-bit utopia sends rose-tinted ripples down the spine of anyone nostalgic for an infantile time in which a witch gleefully grasping a broomstick was just that.īut it’s not, is it, because the witch is grasping a dick. A witch jitters above a pixelated forest schoolchildren gossip in a wobbly polka-dot classroom a plump pair in ‘I <3 HK’ vests vault a skipping rope. A cursory glance reveals the Hong Kong-born artist’s animation to be the stuff of early-childhood ecstasy, its sugar-tweaked estimations of bodies, backdrops and frivolous bliss re-animating the halcyon days of 1980s computer games. Courtesy: the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/ShanghaiĪ similar bilingualism runs through the moving-image work of Wong Ping.
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As James Bridle wrote, for Medium, in response to the ordeal: ‘The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires.’ Dressed in a cartoon pig’s clothing, these bastardized videos led the innocent into an immoral domain, one that erred too close to our own for comfort. In this instance, however, they unwittingly conspired to highjack a supposedly wholesome visual language, using it to introduce swathes of otherwise ignorant children to the gruesome cruelties of the real world. While warped, these online oddities are not thought of as harmful unto themselves. (Dearest Peppa had ample company in her misery.) The second: an organizational algorithm that deals primarily with keywords and is incapable of differentiating between ‘Peppa goes to ballet lesson’ and ‘Peppa pulls gun on princess’. The first: a twisted YouTube subgroup that takes pleasure in forcing beloved children’s characters through gory narratives. The unsuspecting viewership had fallen victim to two markedly sinister products of 21st-century online culture. But, on this occasion, the storylines had a nefarious edge: Peppa drinks bleach Peppa is tortured by a dentist Peppa devours her own father. They get muddy they meet a parrot they fly a kite: if these stories carried a Parental Advisory label, it would be zero, perhaps lower. In 2017, weary parents the world around sat their manic children down in front of YouTube clips of Peppa Pig (2004–ongoing), a cartoon that tells innocuous tales of its porcine lead and her merry band of animal friends.
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Fun for the whole family.īut there is, as always, a line. Such double entendre allows for (at most) societal truths and (at least) droll vulgarities to be trafficked to a mature audience through a seemingly harmless aesthetic, thus increasing the likelihood that a particular show, game or film will remain on the screen for an extended period of time. Children’s entertainment, at its best, speaks in two distinct tongues: the first, primarily visual, is for the kids the second, heavily laced with innuendo and snark, is for us adults, corrupted by our years.