The National Gallery’s recent contemporary project brought a familiar figure from Christian iconography into a modern frame. Berlin-based artist Ming Wong, who served as the museum’s artist-in-residence in 2026, premiered a short film and associated installation in January 2026 that stages the martyr Saint Sebastian among the gallery’s historic paintings. By placing Asian transgender performers at the center of the narrative, Wong unsettles traditional portrayals and invites viewers to consider how images move across time, geography and communities.
Wong’s approach resists simple replication of the past. Rather than treating the gallery as a static backdrop, he choreographs interactions between older works in the collection and a newly recorded 20-minute piece titled Dance of the sun on the water | Saltatio solis in aqua. The result is both a meditation on representation and an explicit conversation with earlier cinematic and artistic interpretations of the saint, from Derek Jarman’s provocative 1976 film to the broader visual traditions preserved by the museum.
An artist’s path through image and identity
Ming Wong is known for restagings that disrupt expectations of race and gender. Throughout his career he has used film and performance to recast familiar scenes; in 2009 he restaged a racially charged sequence from the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life, recasting roles to illuminate how cinematic tropes shape social perception. At the National Gallery his work continued that line of inquiry, this time engaging directly with a figure who has long been read through lenses of beauty, desire and vulnerability.
By repeating and multiplying appearances of the saint, Wong underscores the plasticity of iconography. In the gallery the martyr surfaces as variations on a theme: younger, older, lighter, darker, and, crucially, as multiple versions of an Asian trans man. This deliberate reimagining challenges viewers to see the historic images not as fixed artifacts but as living templates that can be reinterpreted to reflect contemporary experiences and concerns.
Recasting a martyr: technique and reference
Wong’s film borrows narrative fragments and staging choices from Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976), blending them with scenes recreated inside the museum and with stills from at least fourteen depictions of Saint Sebastian in the collection. The effect is a collage that moves from the intimacy of close-up performance to the contemplative distance of oil paintings. Latin-speaking Roman soldiers in the piece are performed by Asian actors of varying genders, further complicating the historical binary between oppressor and subject.
Cinematic echoes and historical layers
The connection to cinematic history is intentional. Jarman’s 1976 film transformed Sebastian into an explicitly homoerotic figure at a moment when such representations were politically charged; Wong mines that lineage while adding questions about race and gender. Other historical moments—like the Renaissance’s adoption of classical male beauty and the 19th-century literary appropriations of Sebastian as an emblem—appear indirectly in the film, creating a web of references that spans centuries and mediums.
Public dialogue and institutional context
The National Gallery framed Wong’s residency as part of its ongoing Modern and Contemporary Programme, an initiative that has hosted artists who interrogate the museum’s collection by placing modern perspectives into dialogue with older works. Curators positioned the piece to provoke reflection about the gallery’s 200-year institutional history and to test how traditional narratives can be made porous by contemporary voices and bodies. The project has been paired with public programming: the gallery scheduled a seminar featuring Ming Wong and medievalist Professor Robert Mills on June 2, 2026, to explore the work’s sources and its relationship to medieval visual culture.
Responses and meanings
Reactions to the installation demonstrate how charged such reinterpretations can be. For some viewers, the presence of Asian trans performers offers overdue visibility and a powerful reframing of a familiar story; for others, placing a religious martyr into contemporary identity politics raises questions about context and respect for tradition. Wong himself has described Saint Sebastian as a figure who travels across centuries and locations, serving as a mirror in which different communities see their own vulnerabilities and strengths.
Ultimately, the project functions as a test case for how museums can open long-held collections to new interpretations. By bringing together film, performance and canonical paintings, Ming Wong’s work asks us to reconsider who gets to inhabit historical images and what those images can say in a changed cultural landscape. The installation is not simply a retelling of martyrdom; it is an argument for the ongoing relevance of art as a space where past and present negotiate identity, desire and belonging.