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M+, Hong Kong, © M+, Hong Kong
Adrian Wong 王浩然
Kasper Hauser, Ramachandra & Natascha the Dog Girl of Chita 卡斯帕·豪茲爾,羅摩占陀羅,來自赤塔的犬女娜塔沙
2007
This installation by conceptual artist Adrian Wong takes the form of three furry, rotund animatronic figures mounted on cube-shaped bases. The puppet-like figures—with their large, cartoonish eyes and round red noses—move and seem to speak along with the installation’s soundtrack, which is based on Wong’s observations of pet owners’ conversations with their animal companions. The nonsense phrases and unintelligible sounds of the installation’s script nevertheless serve as communication, a dialogue without language. Wooden bases perforated with speaker grilles echo the form of radio cabinets, perhaps a subtle nod to the history of radio theatre.
Titled after real examples of ‘feral’ children raised outside human society, sometimes in the company of animals, the installation is an example of Wong’s fascination with language and with animal and human forms of communication. Kaspar Hauser was a nineteenth-century German who claimed to have grown up in a locked, lightless cell (although his claims have drawn suspicion from historians); Ramachandra, known as the ‘amphibian boy’, was found living in the Kuwana River in Uttar Pradesh, India, in the 1970s; and Natasha Mikhailova is a Siberian girl who was discovered in 2009 to have been forced to live alongside dogs and cats. Her primary method of communication was—like Wong’s animatronic actors in this installation—a vocabulary of animal-like noises.
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