Bloody Marys – Song of the South Seas
2018
Bloody Marys – Song of the South Seas
2018
Bloody Marys – Song of the South Seas
mixed media installation featuring a single channel video (10:35) with stereo sound, and artist’s archive of photographs, annotated music scores, cinema ephemera, etc
2018
Bali Ha’i… the name that conjures up tiki dreamlands and tropical beach holidays on faraway fantasy islands. Here am I, Your special island!
Such is the legacy of this showtune from Rogers and Hammerstein’s stage musical South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and was turned into a film in 1958. The plot was based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific about the Pacific campaign in World War II.
Bali Ha’i is the siren song delivered by the native matriach Bloody Mary – a Tonkinese (north Vietnamese) character concocted by her creators out of the colonial swamp of migrants in the Pacific Islands, transplanted there by a French planter – to lure newly arrived Lieutenant Joseph Cable to the forbidden island, in the hope of pimping her young daughter to be his wife.
Her image is a repugnant, sun-dried, mercenary, overweight female, costumed in an assortment of discarded seashell trinkets and army surplus fatigues, barking in her broken English Fo’ Dolla’ in exchange for a grass skirt or some other tropical kitsch curiosity.
Her name Bloody Mary connotes at once histories of brutal, hazardous journeys across the seas; virginities surrendered in violent struggles to survive; the default pet name Mary for the hordes of faceless foreign females, silencing their true native selfness; a damned maternal figure one loves to hate; a salty, spicy pick-me-up, but no cure for a colonial hangover.
In this work, sixteen Bloody Marys are woven together, mostly from amateur and high school musical productions found on the internet and interlaced with the artist’s own rendition and the original Bloody Mary from the film.
This mesh of Marys – revealing a casting spectrum of Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, etc and other forms of ‘unconventional looking’ physical and racial Otherness – calls out for a new ‘special island’ for the 21st century, an island of inclusion and alterity and new subjectivity on the horizon, and a tribute to those individuals who have broken the ground ahead of us.
*
The role of Bloody Mary in Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific was immortalised by two African American actresses, who each played a central role in expanding opportunities for African Americans during the American musical theater’s golden age.
In the 1958 film version, Juanita Hall reprised the stage role that she originated on Broadway but her singing voice is dubbed over by Muriel Smith who played Bloody Mary in the original London production.
Juanita Hall (1901-1968), of African American and Irish parentage, trained at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. She formed the Juanita Hall Choir in 1936 whose performances included radio broadcasts of negro spirituals.
She performed with an African American theatrical troupe the Lafayette Players and had a string of minor roles on Broadway, before the break in her career in her late forties in 1949, when she was cast as Bloody Mary.
Her sharp-witted performance stole the show and earned the short stocky actress the Tony award for Best supporting actress in a Musical in 1950, becoming the first African American to win a Tony Award.
In 1958 she was cast in another Rogers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, the first Broadway show to feature a predominantly Asian cast, with Juanita Hall as the sole exception, playing a Chinese marriage broker, Madam Liang.
She sang the blues on the New York nightclub circuit, and recorded songs including several written for her by Langston Hughes, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
Muriel Smith (1923-1985), whose singing voice is used for Juanita Hall’s portayal of Bloody Mary in the 1958 film, was the First African American to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Even before she graduated in 1946 (in the same class as Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern), she had made her professional début as the original Carmen Jones on Broadway in 1943, based on Bizet’s Carmen with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II featuring an African-American cast.
Despite her early success she was lured to greater opportunities abroad as a black artist and moved to England where she originated the role of Bloody Mary at London’s famed Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1951. In 1953 she appeared in another Rogers and Hammerstein classic The King and I, playing another Asian role, as the King’s head wife Lady Thiang.
From 1956-57 she sang the title role in Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.
She became active in the Moral Re-Armament movement and made her only starring film role in The Crowning Experience in 1960, about the life of Mary McLeod Bethune, the black educator and civil rights activist who became an advisor to President Franklin D Roosevelt. In her own words: “As an artist I am using my talent and my career not only to bring an answer to the problems of America, but to help other nations find their destiny.”
Installation shots, A god, a beast & a line, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2018:
Lehre deutsch mit Petra von Kant / Teach German with Petra von Kant
single channel video (08:00), colour with stereo sound
2017
In 2007 just before moving to Berlin, I made Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant / Learn German with Petra von Kant in which I tried to learn to speak and act like a German by closely emulating the actress Margit Carstensen in the role of fashion designer Petra von Kant, suffering a mid-life-career-crisis in Rainer Werner Fassbinder´s 1972 film Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant).
In the time since I moved to Berlin, Petra von Kant’s expressiveness has given me the words (and attitude!) I needed to overcome similar moments of despair and desperation. From what started as an exercise for a self-designed “integration course” in Germany – who would have guessed? – ten years later I would find myself in the role of a professor at UdK, the University of the Arts in Berlin.
I invited ten of my students to make this work with me to commemorate ten (mostly) productive years of German integration. A broad spectrum of young artists in Berlin, some of whom were as new to the city as I had been in 2007, collectively transformed into this new and restlessly changing figure of Petra von Kant of the new millenium.
跟柏蒂娜学德语
单屏录像装置
10分钟循环
2007年
《柏蒂娜的苦泪》与已故德国导演赖纳·维尔纳·法斯宾德的众多作品一样,讲述了一个苦涩的故事。柏蒂娜是一位反英雄角色,一位事业有成的时装设计师和女同性恋者,她疯狂地爱上了一个美丽的年轻女子卡琳,并试图通过将卡琳打造成一个时装模特的办法来把她牢牢拴在自己身边。她对卡琳的爱不求任何回报,然而在她被卡琳抛弃之后,我们见证了柏蒂娜在自己生日那天等待卡琳电话时歇斯底里的精神崩溃。
黄汉明“重拍”了法斯宾德的这部电影,取名为《跟柏蒂娜学德语》,拍摄于艺术家2007年准备动身定居柏林前夕。黄汉明没有选择报名参加语言课程,取而代之的,是他自己设计了一套“语言与文化融汇项目”,将电影的高潮部分作为他联结二者的纽带。虽然他或许用前文中提到的基于庸俗文化的讽刺立场为出发点,但黄汉明的这一项目中又确有哀婉悲伤之感。他在其个人网站上的描述中说道:
在这件作品中艺术家排演了他相信自己作为一个超过35岁的单身、同性恋、少数族裔、处于职业生涯中期的艺术家在搬到柏林以后所可能遇到的情况中会经历的动作、情感以及要表达的言辞—例如感到痛苦、绝望,或者溃不成军。(“Ich bin im Arsch”,全完了)
《跟柏蒂娜学德语》中,画面被一分为二,左侧是法斯宾德的电影画面,扮演柏蒂娜的是玛吉特·卡斯滕森,一位白人德国女性。画面右侧是黄汉明—一个不会讲德语的亚裔男性—扮演柏蒂娜,或者说是在模仿扮演柏蒂娜的卡斯滕森。
Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant /
Learn German with Petra von Kant
digital video installation
10:00 mins loop
2007
Angst Essen / Eat Fear
single channel video installation
27:00 mins loop
2008
吞噬恐惧
单屏录像
27分
2008
黄汉明刚搬到德国柏林深受柏林克罗伊茨贝格区土耳其文化的影响,创作了这个影像作品《吞噬恐惧》。此作品以导演法斯宾德的电影《恐惧吞噬灵 魂》为蓝本,讲述了一位来自慕尼黑的清洁工艾米与一位比她年轻许多的摩洛哥移民劳工阿里之间的故事。这个在当时被社会遗弃,看似不可能在一起的爱情,最终 在社会舆论的压力下演变成一场悲剧。