In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China. For this video, Wong accompanied six male friends from art school to a group show of their work titled “Inside Looking Out” at Osage Gallery in Beijing. Throughout her visit, she was rarely acknowledged for her own creative accomplishments and was more frequently introduced as an artist’s girlfriend, and often without name. Although inspired by Conceptual art of the 1960s, Wong had never considered her prior work to be in conversation with Feminist Art. Her encounters in Beijing, however, compelled her to address her experience of gendered erasure and discrimination. In her black and white video, Wong stands off camera with a metal stool in hand. As the six artists from the “Inside Looking Out” show appear on screen, Wong hits each one on the head with the stool, provoking winces and laughs from her “victims.” Wong makes it clear that the artists are willing participants, and their laughter and over exaggerated expressions of pain signal that they are “in” on the joke. But Wong’s slapstick violence here is for more than parodic effect, and in staging these violent interventions in miniature, she signals the need for a decisive rupture against art world patriarchies that foreclose opportunities for female and non-binary artists.
Wong Wai Yin is an interdisciplinary artist who experiments with a variety of media ranging from painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video, installations and photography. Taking fragments of her daily life as a point of departure, Wong has transformed these familiar and seemingly humdrum activities into something wanton, witty, and whimsical. By treating the ordinary work with unsurprising indifference, yet interwoven with humour that is playful, irresponsible, and capricious, her work blurs the presumed boundaries between gallery-exhibited art and daily life. Her performance or action-based video works in particular are reminiscent of the conceptual art of the 1960s that questioned the process of making art with elements of chance. Wong’s early artistic training in Hong Kong was focused on traditional Western European studio practices and mediums but she has since been trying to unlearn these conventional means of art making. She has since shifted to a performative and conceptual approach in her work that often stems from autobiographical experiences, episodic memories and playful interventions with art history.
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Sign #1 , Sign #2 , Sign #3 were included in “Found Object Assembly”, Copeland’s 2009 solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco...
Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...
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Getting schooled on the arts (via The Star) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 14, 2018 From surprise visits to schools, replacing white shoes with black, and referencing the Finnish education system as a possible one to emulate, the new Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik has made waves with his fresh approach...
Solid are the Winds: Aeolian Encounters at The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (Part I) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Natasha Harth for QAGOMA untitled (giran) (2018), Jonathan Jones in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM January 10, 2019 By Marcus Yee (1259 words, five-minute read) This is the first of a two-part essay on the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial running at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, from 24 November 2018 to 28 April 2019...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...