ADRIAN WONG
Having lived and worked in dense urban environments for the bulk of his career, Wong is inspired by the boundless intersections and overlapping narratives (visual, linguistic, sonic, and anthropological) that live as vestigial fragments of history in cities renewed, reclaimed, redeveloped, and rebuilt almost beyond recognition. His research and works have run the gamut from secret cabals of revolutionaries in Hong Kong at the turn of the century to archaic Taoist cosmologies and their influence on Southeast Asian architecture, the movements of African diaspora via South America into suburban Rotterdam, secret societies in the American rust belt, the pan cultural meanderings of Wong’s own family tree, and the organic development of false histories manifesting in a constructed and transient truth more rich and fruitful than the Truth itself.
Adrian Wong was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois in 1980. Originally trained in research psychology (receiving a Master’s degree from Stanford University in 2003), he began making and exhibiting work in San Francisco while concurrently conducting experiments on young children. He continued his post-graduate studies at Yale University, where he received an MFA in 2005. Relying heavily on a research based method, his installations, videos, and sculptures draw from varied subjects and explore the intricacies of his relationship to his environment (experientially, historically, culturally, and through the filter of fantastical or fictionalized narratives). These organic and open-ended artifacts of his process often involve a collaborative engagement with subjects.
Wong was been based in Hong Kong from 2005 to 2017, where he was the co-founder and director of Embassy Projects, an arts consultancy and independent production studio. His recent exhibitions include the traveling exhibition “Troglodyte See the Light,” “A Passion for Creation” for the Louis Vuitton Fondation pour la Création, and “Hong Kong Eye” at the Saatchi Gallery. His videos have been screened at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, and Kunsthalle Wien. He is the winner of the 2013-2014 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. And his work is included in the Uli Sigg Collection (Lucerne), the Dominique and Sylvain Levy Collection (Paris), the Kadist Foundation Collection (San Francisco), Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong), M+ Museum Collection (Hong Kong), and the private collections of William Lim (Hong Kong), Honus Tandijono (Hong Kong), and Hallam Chow (Hong Kong) among others. Wong now lives in Chicago, IL and teaches at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.