Singapore, where the artist Ming Wong is from, is racially mixed, chiefly Chinese, Indian, and Malay. One of every two or three people in the country is a foreigner—Singapore was declared the most “globalized” country in the world in 2001. What the hell kind of culture comes from this place, and what can the rest of us “global” people learn from it? Wong takes the golden era of Singaporean cinema in the 1950s as the starting point for his exhibition of video performances, photographs, billboard paintings, and documentary short films. It’s called Life of Imitation (the title is a play on the American Lana Turner vehicle Imitation of Life, a melodrama about a mixed-race woman passing as white). The way he reenacts and re-presents movies, they fall apart and come together again in a heap with entirely new facets catching the light. (Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, 622-9250, 11 am–5 pm, free)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

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