Surprising Encounter in the Uzbek Desert
Deutsche Bank Employees Meet Collection Artist Hoy Cheong Wong

An incredible coincidence: Within the framework of Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Community Partnership Program, Jedrzej Mazur und Ben Bruno held lectures at the Banking and Finance Academy in Tashkent. From the Uzbek capital, they took a trip to historic Nurata. The town, founded by Alexander the Great, has since the 10th century been a destination of Moslem pilgrims. Over the last years Nurata has also been attracting more and more tourists. During an excursion in the surrounding desert, the two Deutsche Bank employees met a traveler from Malaysia. Around a campfire at night, Mazur and Bruno told him they worked for Deutsche Bank, whereupon their new acquaintance said: “I know it. Works of mine are on exhibit in one of the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt.” In the middle of the desert of Uzbekistan, they had met Hoy Cheong Wong, one of 60 international artists to whom an entire floor of the Deutsche Bank Towers is devoted. "It was indeed an unlikely and perhaps serendipitous encounter in the middle of the Kyzyl Kum desert in Uzbekistan!", he says.

Hoy Cheong Wong is one of Malaysia’s most prominent artists. His themes include tensions, social injustice, and working conditions in a globalized world. He is represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection with works from his photo series Maid in Malaysia, among others. In them, he depicts Indonesian and Philippine women, who work all over Asia as underpaid domestic help, as Supergirl or Joan of Arc, thereby juxtaposing cliché images of ideal femininity with the reality of women migrants’ lives.