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Drawing its name and inspiration from a popular Chinese nursery rhyme, Who’s the Daddy tells the tale of a disgraceful man who has unexpectedly stumbled across the path of child-rearing. The viewer follows the man’s dating app trial as he attempts to evaluate potential partners’ political beliefs by analysing their profile photos. His eventual ‘match’ with a strictly religious woman, and their ensuing relationship, reveals the man’s shameful satisfaction with subjugation, a fetish that is further explored by a juxtaposition of references to his childhood memories. Through a combination of the man’s contemptible powerlessness and the woman’s tenuous religious beliefs, the protagonist ultimately takes on the merciless role of a single father.
Ultimately though, Wong Ping’s animations are not meant to be discouraging. They are happy, in a darkly twisted yet realistic manner. Through their rawness, his works provide a sense of uncharacteristic comfort in that even our deepest and most private sentiments or acts are shared by others. In this way, Wong Ping’s work is liberating and perversely honest—a cathartic twist on the trials rooted in daily life.
Shine bright. Portraits of a nomadic musician and an animatedly-perverse single father butt up against a simulacrum of the Middle East and a tactile inquiry into the natural world. Taken together, expressions of personal, political, spiritual, mystical and sexual agency provide powerful statements of either resistance to or complicity in an increasingly commodified world.
