Soong Sisters: MEIAC Museum (Spain) virtual gallery ,
Co-workers & Funding
Soong Sisters (2001) was created as part of an individual exhibition in Fábrica da Pólvora in Barcarena (Oeiras) and I named it reality>media>data>database. The exhibition name was inspired by Lev Manovich text “Database as a symbolic form” (1998) latter published in his book The Language of New Media (2001). This show presented a projection of the three web-based projects (Between Poets, Jizo and Soong Sisters) for viewers to manipulate the projects in a more immersive way.
The Songs Sisters project was about the life story of three Chinese women, Ai-ling, Ching-ling and May-ling. They were Charlie Soong millionaire daughters. The father made his fortune selling bibles in China. According to Soong sisters’ mythology it was said that the middle one (Ching-ling, happy mood, married the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen) loved China, the youngest (May-ling, beautiful spirit, married General Chiang Kai-Shek) loved power, and finally the eldest (Ai-ling, pleasant mood, married to finance minister H.H. Kung). One of the Soong brothers, T.V. Soong, was considered the richest man in the world in the 40s/50s. The Soong Dynasty “reigned” for almost a century, controlling Chinese politics, economy, and society. With influential ramifications in the Chinese underworld and the “gangs” that controlled it.
The father, Charlie Soong, left China very young to go to the United States of America, where he studied and was converted to the Catholic religion. Upon returning to China, he opened a publishing house, Sino-American Press (Hua-Mei Shu) and began to print bibles at low prices, which allowed access to the biblical text to a greater number of people. Charlie Soong and Sun Yat-sen became friends and in 1894 both began to conspire in Shanghai in favour of the revolution. Charlie Soong became one of the founding members of Dr. Sun Yat-sen cult. Ai-ling was one of the most hated woman in China and Ching-ling was considered the widow of China after Dr. Sun Yat-sen death in 1925.
I heard the story from a close friend when I was in Malaysia in 1999 and immediately started to research the three sisters lives from books such as Emily Hahn’s The Soong Sisters (1943), Roby Eunson’s The Soong Sisters (1975) and Sterling Seagrave’s The Soong Dynasty (1996). In 2019, writer Jung Chang published her engaging book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth Century China, a very complete overview of the three sisters’ relevance in challenging traditional women models in China and elsewhere.
The digital work was latter, after the individual exhibition at Fábrica da Pólvora, further developed with an hypertextual game where the interactor would reconstruct the three sisters’ life stories in a playful manner and in 2002 the Spanish Museu Estremenho e Ibero-americano de Arte Contemporânea (MEIAC) bought it for their virtual gallery. Like in the previous presented web-based projects the aim was to reflect about the role of women in a poetical and strange way frustrating the viewer to stimulate critical and meaningful interactions.
In 2005 the three projects (Pereira, 2019, p. 51: footnote) were presented as part of the Online Portuguese NetArt 1997 exhibition curated by Sofia Oliveira and Luís Silva (Oliveira & Silva, 2005, online).