Smash: Reflecting Sex

The artist records everyday activities in the streets and alleys around the Main and Hasting Street intersection. On the right, the view is from a fixed camera positioned on top of a dashboard in a moving car. On the left, he walks with a handheld camera with a wide angle lens. Along the way he encounters a street artist, engages with two women in Pigeon Park, crack users, dealers and homeless people.

The Hotel featured 12 site-specific performances and art installations created by Wong, which wowed the thousands who attended. This 17-minute video is both document of and art which captures the manic beauty and chaos of Wong’s mise en scène event.

The Mainstreeters initiated a number of commercial enterprises. Support Modelling was a modelling agency comprised of members of the local art and punk rock scene. To promote the project, Paul Wong made a three-channel video (later adapted to single channel) that featured certain Mainstreeters in various states of undress, accompanied by a disco soundtrack. Support Modelling also appears as a series of concept ads (weddings, funerals) in Ennui magazine.

A couple of bumbling guys on a dark road in Nicaragua spot a snake. They bound after the serpent that has slitered into the tall grass. Using bare hands they seize the Diamondback Rattler.

Storm, quite simply is a video recording of a car ride at night in hurricane forces. This is visual art that delivers us from the purely visual back to the world of the physical experience with all our senses awakened. Instead of bringing us the installation photographic image – or the digitally enhanced photographic simulation – these artists direct us from the world of images to the world of things, inviting us to grapple with them at first hand.

After losing on a bad investment and falling in debt with a loan shark, Peter Yang turns to gambling, but with the help of an honest gambler, Bobby Chu, starts to win big time. This infuriates a ruthless game player, Tommy Chao, who does everything in his power to cheat them.

Based on slides shot in 1978 of the Austrian aktion artist Hermann Nitsch. Put away for 24 years, the color transparencies are spread out on a light table. The images are examined with a macro lens and captured with digital video. Not so much a reconstruction, or documentary of an event but a process of re-imagining. A hundred frames record a 12-hour, noon to midnight performance in an Roman amphitheatre in the center of Trieste in Northern Italy. Hermann Nitsch has been creating his unique rituals since the early 1970’s. The blood flows over naked bodies strapped on crosses, carried blindfolded, senses are tweaked with percussion sounds and blaring brass instruments. Religious iconography, operatic orchestrations of cast, crew, friends, and the public who eat, dance, drink.

Mixing together of Pantages’ Implosion of a longtime down town east side landmark: the Woodwards building, with Wong’s Downtown Eastside alleys.

A skillful, sensual rendering of an intriguing performance orchestrated by the artist. Through a fog-laden atmosphere, iconic figures emerge to perform on a huge turntable. Our look at this garishly lit spectacle is mediated by the gaze of a female Red Guard. All flesh and brilliance, this tape appears to critique popular culture by robbing it of any ostensible content. Hollywood proverb says, beneath the surface of fake tinsel lies only the real tinsel – the detritus of our times.

Icon of Jesus is marched through town in the days leading up to Easter.

A foreign landowner negotiates with the locals and oversees digging of a well on his property.

“Early in the morning on Thursday Feb 26, 1976, a young First Nations man named Eugene Lloyd Pelly was fatally stabbed in an apartment at 4272 Watson Street, east of Main near 28th. After escaping out a window Pelly collapsed in the middle of the road and, as snow fell, succumbed to his injuries. That same morning Jeanette Reinhardt noticed Pelly’s bloody body from her window. Paul Wong, whom she was living with at the time, shot a roll of 35mm film documenting the scene – first from their window, and later at roadside. The quiet violence of the scene captivated Wong, and together with collaborator Kenneth Fletcher, the two embarked on a project to research the crime in full detail." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage 1972-1982

In picture-in-picture style Wong has structured four recordings made in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of Southern California. Recorded in the blistering heat of July he positions the natural and man’s failed attempts to exist in this unrelenting climate. Against the background of the ravine he positions the study of an empty swimming pool. The graffiti covered pool used by skateboarders was part of a short-lived yacht club. Another study is that of abandoned habitats and trailer parks on the shores of the Salton Sea. These play alongside images of the Joshua Tree.

A made for the camera video collaboration with Steve Paxton, a unique pas de deux between videographer and dancer.

Excerpts featuring Paul Wong as the Wiry Man in Season 3, Episode 19 of the X-Files (1996). Part of Paul Wong’s ‘5’, a series of site-specific events and installations commissioned by the City Of Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Programs.

"Paul Wong’s Mahjong is rooted in the visual and oral sensuality of the game–the saturated colours of green in the game pieces and table top, the characters and names, floral patterns and coloured numbers on the dice and game pieces. It is this rich iconography that allows the participants to invent their own rules and play the game according to the images at hand." - Jordan Strom