Last Year

This three-channel installation, from the Modern Television Loop Series, utilizes the qualities of real and edited time. “Three views of Toronto’s underground action; trains pull in, pause, doors open, crowds exchange places, whirl off into oblivion. It is mesmerizing, this subsurface world. You could sit and watch for hours as the hypnotic qualities of TV sets and passing trains act together”. - Peggy Gale, 1977, Only Paper Today.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mixed Messages is a work that addresses the issues of race and sexuality. This mixed media installation consists of three life size photographs of Gina Gonzalez, who is subject of two 20 minute videotapes. Gina is a transsexual claiming to have undergone a sex change between the first taped interview, in 1990, and the second, in 1994. In the initial session Gina allows us to glimpse into her life as a prostitute; in the next she reacts to the first taping. We not only look at her or listen to her, but she is also present in the form of a life-size photo cutout. The artist explores the boundaries between the public and private, and between appearance and reality. Conventional behaviour patterns, attitudes, and stereotypes are challenged in a work that brings out a variety of voyeuristic reactions in the subject, the artist, and the viewer.

"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

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.

“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 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.

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

Miss Chinatown juxtaposes the views of eight subjects against the background image of a beauty pageant: the Miss Chinese-Vancouver 1996. The subjects are all full or part ethnic Chinese, together they represent a diverse face of the Chinese-Canadian community, they present different perspectives on identity, home, sex and race. The contestants are seen going through the paces in the cheong-san (traditional side slit dress) segment of the live television spectacle.

Projected onto 8’ weather balloon. Recorded at Joshua Tree National Park. Part of the Scorched series.

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