Born in Singapore. Dutch Citizen. Based in Germany.
Colours in
Italian
Il bianco è la divisa.
Devo indossare camicie bianche con pantaloncini e poi pantaloni per 4 anni.
Ecco perché non indosso più i pantaloni.
Una camicia bianca va bene.
Il bianco è sporco perché è difficile da tenere pulito.
Il giallo è sacro.
È anche la mia infanzia, perché mi ricordo di quando camminavo sulla spiaggia al tramonto.
Il giallo è il buddismo
Mi piace l'arancione.
E il rosso perché le vesti dei monaci hanno colori simili.
Penso che sia per questo che ho così tante magliette arancioni.
L'arancione è anche le risaie, o quasi.
Voglio ritirarmi e diventare un monaco che pianta il riso.
Il verde è l'infanzia.
Sono cresciuto con molto verde in campagna, prima che venissero costruiti gli appartamenti.
Non mi piace il grigio perché è il colore del cemento che mi ha portato via l’infanzia.
Thoughts
For me, my sense of belonging comes from being grounded. I begin to understand this when I started working on a piece of land that I bought, or more precisely, working with the soil and plants of the land. As my body engages with the materiality of the land, I find myself bonding with it. Just as I care for it, it also nournishes me in return. We start to form a strange symbosis, which I find hard to describe. On a supericial level, I am laying claim to the land and exerting my ownership over it. But the opposite is equally true. The more I work the land, the more I seek refuge in it - it has become my shelter and protector. It gives me strength and meaning. Even as the land yields itself to me, it has taken over me and germinated roots inside me. And it is these roots that ground me.
But more interestingly, I find out that these inner roots in me are not really bound to any specific land, country or place. They stay with me wherever I go. So in each place I go to, these roots will self-germinate anew and ground me. Through them, I re-localise myself in every place I move to, much like a weed. My home is therefore not limited to a specific physical or geographical place, but rather a sense of being in my own skin and letting my inner roots work their magic, as they setlle in. This means that I do not need to build a new home everywhere I go. Through these roots, I discovered that everywhere is actually connected and every place is already my home.
Ming Poon works with applied choreography, using it as a tool to interrogate, disrupt and re-organise the social and political relationality of the body in time and space. In particular, he is interested in the potential within the body of the weak/peripheral to resist and disrupt hegemonic structures, using choreographic strategies that involve decolonisation, vulnerability, care, queerness and failure. For him, movement refers to the body’s ability to move, take action, and have agency to create change. He sees his works as choreographic interventions and social experiments, which are created using ethnographic methodology and experimental design. The idea is to invite the public to exercise their agency to create change, so that their actions determine the outcome and experience of the works. As such, his works are interactive and collaborative in design. They usually take the form of collaborative performances, public interventions and intimate encounters.
He initiated Asian Performing Artists Lab (APAL) in 2020 as a platform for artists with Asian background to meet, share and work together and is a founding member of Urgent Bodies, a a newly formed collective whose goal is to bring dance and activism together. He also manages The Farm, an independent space that combines performance-making with activism and co-living. Through these projects, he wants to bring his choreographic practice beyond the question of how we want to make work, and ask how we can create community instead.
His practice is inspired by Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler's resistance in vulnerability, Jack Halberstam's queer art of failure, Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud's micro-utopias.