Paul Wong
1954 (70 лет)
So Are You
Paul Wong
So Are You is a 25 minute videotape about the difficulties of assuming ones self-identity. Identity is shaped and informed by the dominant culture, often producing stereotypes that are reinforced by the media. Through such structures racist behaviour is learned and condoned. So Are You uses unconventional structures and casting to criticize stereotypes. The eighteen cast members include Natives, Asians, Blacks and Whites. Paul Wong continues to explore the idea of self-identity by investigating gender boundaries through the inclusion of a set of identical male twins and two female impersonators who portray twins and two female impersonators who portray twins in the cast. The video uses recognizable television and cinematic framing devices to highlight the idea of the construction and dissemination of stereotypes through the broadcast news, cinema verite, interviews, etc. Comprised of short scenes, So Are You is faced paced and entertaining.
So Are You
Jazz Slave Ships
Elspeth Sage, Paul Wong
Jan Wade, Vanessa Richards
Jazz Slave Ships was a site-specific performance collaboration between Vancouver artist Jan Wade and London-based performer Vanessa Richards that involved the creation of an ancestral altar. It took place in two U.K. ports in October 1996: on the West Coast in Whitehaven, Cumbria (the last English slaving port), in an 18th century bonded warehouse used to store liquor and guns used in the slave trade; and on the East Coast in Hull, Yorkshire in Wilberforce House, the birthplace of the anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce and now a museum of anti-slavery. The production took place over a 3-week period that began Sept. 30, 1996.
Jazz Slave Ships
Scorched
Paul Wong
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.
Scorched
Chelsea Hotel Room 207
Paul Wong
Attila Richard Lukacs, Jermain
Crack induced euphoria amplifies a sexually charged environment. The cameraman is implicitly involved in the activities of two men in tightie-whities (one black/one white). Described by viewers as both horrific and so full of humanity. This work is not what-it-seems, or is it?
Chelsea Hotel Room 207
Downtown Eastside
Paul Wong
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.
Downtown Eastside
Confused: Sexual Views
Paul Wong
The installation Confused: Sexual Views was part of a three-phase project that also included Confused [the videotape] and Confused [the performance]. It was produced just before AIDS had reached epidemic proportions. Twenty-seven individuals face the camera head-on as they speak about bisexuality, especially its more complex and engaging aspects, such as the relationship between sexuality, love, and friendship. Without mincing words, they challenge the conventions of behaviour and human relations conveyed by commercial film and television, and refute the myths surrounding the notion of romantic love. The intent here is to question the constrictive mores that sanction only one style of love, and to examine the many forms of desire and sexuality experienced in our culture, approaching them from a variety of perspectives.
Confused: Sexual Views
Hell Money
Paul Wong
Paul Wong
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.
Hell Money
Sally
Paul Wong
Sally Chui, Paul Wong
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.
Sally
Hands Across the Border
Liza Bear, Willoughby Sharp
Hands Across The Border was a seven city slow scan collaboration. With participation from Paul Wong, Sharon Levett & Daryl Lacey, Video Inn, Vancouver;Randall Lyon & Gus Nelson, Televista Projects, Memphis; Sharon Grace, Video Free America, Berkeley Art Museum, U.C.; Peggy Cady, Bill Bartlett, Chas Leckie. Open Space, Victoria; Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal & Willoughby Sharp, General Idea, Toronto; Liza Bear & Robin Winters, Center for New Art Activities, NY.; et al. Slow-scan television equipment used a computerised memory to sample a picture from a television camera every few seconds, “freeze” it and send it down a telephone line as an audio signal. The machines could only be used between two points at a time. At the receiving end, the signal was decoded and slowly scanned out a still frame on a television monitor.
Hands Across the Border
Storm
Paul Wong
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.
Storm
Enter the Dragon 1973-2008
Paul Wong
Two seminal moments of recent media history are presented side by side. The closing scene from the film Enter The Dragon* starring Bruce Lee are juxtaposed with the first segment from the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
Enter the Dragon 1973-2008
2 Hot 2 Handle
Paul Wong
On the right stills and video of the 2009 Canadian Rockies International Rodeo in Strathmore, Alberta. On the left stills and titles/text of rodeo bronzes from the Glenbow’s collection. Wong’s work is an impressionistic portrait, which explores this alternative part of Alberta’s history. It is not meant to be a documentary/literal portrayal of the gay rodeo but rather it situates it in the context of the story of the west and the construction of identities. Wong’s work uses these frozen gestures to explore the complexities of gender and sexuality. In-relation-to the bronzes, the videos introduce movement to their very static image and highlighting our constantly evolving and shifting society.
2 Hot 2 Handle
Mixed Messages
Paul Wong
Gina Gonzalez
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.
Mixed Messages
