For 12 weeks ending on Easter Monday, late medieval and early Renaissance portraits in the National Gallery in London mingled with a contemporary take on the closest thing the LGBTQ+ community has to a patron saint: Sebastian, the early Christian martyr shot through with arrows by Roman legionnaires on orders from Emperor Diocletian.

Ming Wong, the museum’s latest artist-in-residence, said he came to his vision of that representation slowly, after months wandering the galleries and, in particular, acquainting himself with portrayals of the popular saint, one of the most painted in the Western canon.

Related

Unshakeable artist cancels Smithsonian show after attempted censorship of Black trans woman painting

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Wong, a Singaporean who now calls Berlin home, is the first to admit he was an unusual choice for the coveted in-house artist spot; his work is performance-based. Film and video installations by the gay artist reimagine and recast movie classics with actors assuming multiple parts that upend gender and race expectations; Wong has been doing Bridgerton work in contemporary art settings since before there was a Bridgerton.

In 2009, he restaged a racially charged scene from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Technicolor melodrama, Imitation of Life, between Lana Turner’s Black maid and her white-passing daughter, fast-forwarding that film and the same, relevant argument 50 years into the future by casting male actors of Chinese, Malay, and Indian descent into the roles.

So, for his final bow as artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, the self-described “creator” tackled representations of the gay icon, patron St. Sebastian, drawing not only on depictions from the museum’s own collection but also on the gay British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s homoerotic classic Sebastiane (1976) as source material.

The result was “Dance of the sun on the water | Saltatio solis in aqua,” a 20-minute film shot in and around the museum’s galleries, and named for a dance performed by Sebastian in Jarman’s sexually-charged retelling of the story. 

Wong’s recasting worked two fresh identities into his representation of Sebastian: the martyred saint was now multiple versions of an Asian trans man.

The idea unfolded on nighttime walks through the galleries, Wong told The Times of London.

Sebastian kept “reappearing in different centuries and different geographies,” he said, all varied but beautiful: pale, androgynous, slight, muscular, light and dark.

For both Wong and an earlier gay audience, he said, those depictions eventually hit a critical mass.

“Because of how he had been aestheticized by the Renaissance artists,” Wong says of Sebastian, “the gay eye began to notice his figure and creatives began to adopt him in their work, their writing, their poetry, their paintings.”

By the 19th century, that recognition was becoming political: Oscar Wilde used the pseudonym Sebastian after his exile following charges of sodomy. In the 1970’s, Jarman used the saint’s story and explicit homoeroticism to provoke a broader audience during the gay liberation movement.

“It was controversial for its time for the depiction of male love and homosexuality on a big screen,” Wong said of the film, Jarman’s first directorial effort, shot on a shoestring budget. “We couldn’t afford costumes,” Jarman once joked of the film’s unabashed and near-total nudity.

Not long after, Sebastian the martyr earned more resonance for gay men as the AIDS crisis unfolded.

In Wong’s film, both the saint and the Roman legionnaires who would murder Sebastian are recast as Asian, depicting select episodes from Jarman’s film, originally shot in sun-baked Sardinia, now recreated in the galleries along with 14 other portrayals of Sebastian in the museum’s collection, to illustrate the timelessness — and plasticity — of his story.

“St. Sebastian is a time and space traveler, a marvelous vision of a human whose gender and age also seem to shift,” Wong told ARTnews as his show approached closing. “We will all be Sebastians. We will all be, in turn, destroyers and martyrs.”

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.