The Hotel

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Approx. 6000 images, 1000 still photographs a minute flash on and off the screen. A year of pictures mash into an intense viewing experience. Using the iphoto software, Last Year is the result of compiling all 2009 photographs from several different computer sources onto one central database. The images were put into ‘a chronology’ according to iphoto logic. Part journal, part diaristic we see Wong’s incessant recording of everyday life from Chinese New Year celebrations in Vancouver, Beijing Olympics, artists, art exhibitions, architecture, friends, family, New York streets, parties, music concerts, film festivals, Calgary Stampede, Pride Parade, Toronto moments.

With real and constructed reflected views we glide down the Grand Canal in silence. We enter a tighter waterway slipping past buildings on each side and go under foot bridges. The single view splits into multiple views, as we reach open water it returns to a single view. The journey is repeated in reverse and speeded up.

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

"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

Dennis and Barb McDonald are empty nesters from the suburbs. On this day they get legal possession of their new house. They have privately purchased the burned out house directly from its owner. John Jeffery grew up in this house. He has been living on the property since the fire destroyed the house a year ago. John is the last of the old families with deep roots still on the street. He is now surrounded by recent neighbours who are more interested in retrofitting character homes than the people who live in them.

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.

Sally is a portrait, a love ballad. The artist gazes at beautiful Sally as she relaxes in her bathrobe in the sumptuous suite of the China Club in Beijing. Always behind the camera, Wong is uninhibited as ever as he crafts an intimate portrait. Recorded in Hong Kong and Beijing.

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.

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.

The scattering of Steve Lacy’s ashes at Long Island, NY on March 21, 2006.

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.