Singaporean artist Ming Wong reimagines a saint and LGBTQ icon at London gallery

When Ming Wong was asked to be the 2025 artist in residence at London’s National Gallery, he felt delighted and shocked. “I was really confounded,” he says. “Why did they invite me?” The National Gallery predominantly shows paintings created before 1900, while Wong works mostly with video and performance, sometimes using futuristic imagery borrowed from science fiction. Wong, who was born in Singapore, often makes art exploring Asian cinema, theatre and pop culture. In contrast, the National Gallery’s collection is dominated by European art, and its four previous artists in residence were all from Europe or the Middle East. Wong has spent almost a year connecting the dots between his work and this bastion of European art history. The result is a new film and installation, Dance of the sun on the water / Saltatio solis in aqua, which runs at the gallery until April 5, 2026. The film is a retelling of the story of St Sebastian, whom Wong kept encountering at the gallery. “Sebastian appeared in different rooms, in different time periods, in different geographies,” Wong says. “He is like a time traveller.” Wong became fascinated by the 14 depictions of the saint in the gallery’s collection, which date from between the 15th and 17th centuries. According to myth, Sebastian was a Roman soldier in the third century who converted to Christianity. When this was discovered, he was sentenced to death, tied to a tree and shot with arrows, although he miraculously survived this torture. He later berated the Roman emperor Diocletian for his attacks against Christians and was subsequently bludgeoned to death, a martyr to his faith. Since then, Sebastian has meant different things to different people. He is the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, among others, and his defiance of his death sentence made him a popular symbol during the bubonic plague. Wong knows Sebastian best as an LGBTQ icon. From the late 19th century to the present, the saint’s story of staying true to oneself in the face of oppression has been empowering to many in the queer community. Sebastian’s bravery also resonated during the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1980s and 90s, when he was painted by artists such as Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz. Portraits of Sebastian also provided queer men throughout history with a chance to appreciate the male nude in art. The saint is almost always shown wearing only a loincloth, pierced by arrows, sometimes with his head rolled back in religious ecstasy. “I think the Renaissance artists sometimes went a little overboard with sexualising his image,” Wong says, laughing. “There are reports of nuns fainting at the sight of paintings. They had to put curtains in front of them.” Studying the Sebastians in the National Gallery, Wong was reminded of his own experience of being touched by the saint. In 1997, he moved to London to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. While in the city, he watched Sebastiane (1976), a feature film about the saint by fellow Slade alumnus Derek Jarman, who died in 1994 from Aids-related complications. “The decade I lived in London as a queer art graduate stepping out into the world, Jarman was an icon,” Wong says. After making Sebastiane, Jarman became something of a modern-day version of the saint. The media vilified him and his work, but he remained unbowed. Jarman was such a hero of the LGBTQ community that in 1991 he was “canonised” by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay activists who dressed as nuns. Like Sebastian, Jarman is now hailed as a martyr. “The idea of martyrdom is interesting these days when people are taking sides and looking towards a figurehead for their beliefs,” Wong says. Questions about martyrdom are at the core of Wong’s retelling of Sebastian’s story, which sometimes diverges from the original. Wong’s characters speak a version of Latin and wear loincloths, but the action unfolds in the National Gallery today rather than Ancient Rome. He has also injected some diversity into the gallery by casting only actors with Asian or part-Asian heritage. Perhaps most radically, Wong’s video ends with each of his actors taking turns being the saint and the executioner. “I think it reflects reality – we don’t share the same martyrs,” Wong says. It also hints at the topsy-turvy nature of today’s world, especially online, where anyone has the power to attack and turn today’s saint into tomorrow’s sinner. This blurring of identities occurs in many of Wong’s other videos. Often, the same actor plays multiple roles, or the same role is played by several actors. Much of the time, Wong or his actors are also impersonating a character already familiar to the audience – like Maggie Cheung Man-yuk’s character from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) – so there is a visible layering of numerous identities in each person on screen. “I think the root of that is in me having been born and grown up in Singapore, where I think identities are in flux,” Wong says. As a child, Wong went to Catholic school, “while at home we did traditional customs, which had Taoist and Buddhist origins, even though they weren’t necessarily ideological. That’s what I love about Singapore – these collisions of beliefs, of languages”. A year ago, Wong was unsure how his work aligned with the National Gallery. Now that his residency is coming to an end, he believes he has figured it out. “A grand tradition of painting is artists looking to master artists for inspiration,” he says. This is clear in the National Gallery’s portraits of Sebastian. Each of them is unique, but they all feature the same core image of the saint, which has passed from artist to artist through the centuries. “How I have come to terms with being selected for this residency is that I also look towards masters of the image. It’s just, in my case, it’s the moving image, it’s cinema,” he says. “For me, Derek Jarman was the key to making the work.” “Ming Wong: Dance of the sun on the water | Saltatio solis in aqua”, National Gallery Artist in Residence, Rooms 10, 58, 59 and 60, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. Until April 5. Entry is free. For more information, visit www.nationalgallery.org.uk.

Singaporean artist Ming Wong reimagines a saint and LGBTQ icon at London gallery

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A film by Ming Wong, artist in residence at London’s National Gallery, recasts St Sebastian with Asian actors and questions identity

A film by Ming Wong, artist in residence at London’s National Gallery, recasts St Sebastian with Asian actors and questions identity