RE:looking, a video work by one of Malaysia’s foremost contemporary practitioners, Wong Hoy Cheong, explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, artifice and authenticity by presenting an otherwise believable, authoritative narrative – in the form of a documentary program. Put on by the so-called MBC (Malaysian Broadcasting Corporation) examines the impact of the former Malaysian Empire on post-colonial Austria. Adopting the format of news and documentaries, the video parodies television network documentaries as researched, authoritative forms of information. It begins as a serious program, but soon begins to provoke a sense of discomfort for both sides of the divide as fictive events, memories and histories begin to evoke urgent contemporary problems of migrancy, racism, power relationships and empire. This work exploits the inherent problems of information dissemination in a cybernetic age – a realm of the fictive, the unattributed and the questionable.
