Ming Wong Turns the National Gallery’s Saint Sebastians Into a Queer, Time-Traveling Film
What happens when a museum built on stillness hands its galleries to an artist who thinks in motion? During a residency at the National Gallery in London last year, Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong (b. 1971) was granted rare access to the institution’s European painting collection — and responded with a film that treats the museum not as a backdrop, but as a charged stage.
The resulting work, “Dance of the Sun on the Water | Saltatio Solis in Aqua,” reimagines Saint Sebastian — the third-century Roman centurion and Christian martyr traditionally pictured bound and pierced with arrows — as a figure that slips between eras, bodies, and languages. In Wong’s telling, Sebastian becomes a cinematic shape-shifter: queer icon, historical fragment, and recurring role.
“Saint Sebastian is a time and space traveler, a marvelous vision of a human whose gender and age also seem to shift,” Wong said in a recent interview. “We will all be Sebastians. We will all be, in turn, destroyers and martyrs.”
Shot inside the National Gallery’s ornate marble interiors, the film places Asian performers of multiple genders in Latin-speaking tableaux that echo — and unsettle — the museum’s own painted Sebastians. The institution holds 14 depictions of the saint, a concentration that allows Wong to treat the martyr not as a single image but as a motif that has been revised, aestheticized, and re-authored across centuries.
Often dressed in little more than loincloths, Wong’s cast moves through stylized reenactments of Sebastian’s suffering. They dance, embrace, fight, and hold poses that rhyme with the bound figures in Renaissance and Baroque canvases nearby. The effect is less a straightforward retelling than a series of collisions: devotional imagery meets performance; the museum’s hush meets bodies that insist on presence.
Wong’s film also carries a clear cinematic afterimage. Its atmosphere is haunted by Derek Jarman’s 1976 “Sebastiane,” a landmark of queer cinema that staged the saint’s story in Latin. Wong refracts that reference through the National Gallery’s collection, turning the museum’s paintings into a kind of lens — and asking what it means to inherit Western art history from a position shaped by migration, translation, and misrecognition.
That tension has long been central to Wong’s practice. Raised in Singapore, he has described the country as “slowly throwing off its colonial layers,” a place where rapid urbanization, shifting language policies, and new cultural institutions could be felt in real time. Though he came from a family connected to medicine, he chose art at 15, a decision he has framed as both personal defiance and a wager on Singapore’s emerging cultural ambitions.
In the 1990s, he trained in traditional Chinese ink painting, calligraphy, and literature at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Wong has recalled the rigor of that education — including extensive copying — as both punishing and formative, offering him a route back to cultural inheritance. At the same time, he wrote English-language plays and absorbed a wide spectrum of film and television: Hong Kong melodramas, Hollywood noir, Bollywood musicals, and Singaporean variety shows. For Wong, cinema became a school for identity, especially as a young queer viewer learning to recognize desire across difference.
After moving to London for a master’s degree at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art, Wong began a body of work built on deliberate miscasting. He inserted himself into canonical Western films — taking on every role without formal acting training — to test how race, gender, and nationality are coded on screen. That strategy reached a major international audience with “Life of Imitation,” which debuted in the Singaporean Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and received a Special Mention from the Golden Lion jury. His other notable works include “Angst Essen / Eat Fear” (2008) and “Next Year / L’Année Prochaine” (2016).
“Dance of the Sun on the Water | Saltatio Solis in Aqua” extends that method into the museum itself. Rather than treating Old Master painting as untouchable, Wong uses it as material — something to be re-performed, re-voiced, and re-seen. In doing so, he positions Saint Sebastian not as a fixed emblem of suffering, but as a role that can be inhabited and revised, carrying new meanings as it passes through different bodies and histories.
Wong has described his process as a cycle of observing, thinking, experimenting, questioning, and repeating — aiming for a variable collage of media rather than a single claim to originality. That approach is also shaping his current research into Cantonese opera’s trans-Pacific migrations from Hong Kong to North America, and its unexpected intersections with Hollywood and early country music.
At the National Gallery, the question his film leaves hanging is deceptively simple: if a saint can be painted 14 times and still refuse to settle into one meaning, what else in the museum might be less stable than it appears?
