Paul Wong
Vancouver 49° 15' 39.14" N, 123° 6' 50.23" W Arts Media Arts Person
Published books
| Title | Extended title | Year of Publication |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow Peril Reconsidered | 1990 |
As a self-invented video pioneer and one of Canada’s most renowned multimedia artists, Paul Wong is an award-winning artist, curator, and organizer of events and public interventions since the mid-1970s. Known particularly for his tough engagement with issues of race, sex and death, Wong’s work is varied and eclectic, ranging from conceptual performances to complex narratives, meshing video, photography, installation and performance with rare Chinese-Canadian meets cutting edge counter culture perspectives.
Described as a Chinese-Canadian Andy Warhol, Wong’s work is in your face, radical, eccentric, sexy, campy, shocking, experimental and spontaneous. He is a media subversive, a video renegade relying on artistic entrepreneurial smarts and is a raw originality with an eye for social context, driven by an insatiable search for identity, community and authenticity. Wong is constantly redefining his role as an artist and cultural strategist staying ten projects ahead of even himself and always unpredictable.
Wong has produced projects and shown his work throughout Canada, as well as in China and Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the UK and in the United States amongst elsewhere. His works are in many public collections including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Winner of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 1992, Wong was also the first recipient of the Transforming Art Award from the Asian Heritage Foundation in 2002. In 2003 he was the inaugural winner of the Trailblazer Expressions Award, created by Heritage Canada, the National Film Board and CHUM Limited. Heralded as a “national treasure”, Wong was the 2005 recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and was the Canadian Spotlight Artist and also awarded Best Canadian Film or Video at the 2008 Reel Asian International Film Festival.
Paul Wong is the founding director of several artists groups including the Video In/VIVO (Satellite Video Exchange Society 1973) and On Main (On The Cutting Edge Production Society).