This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2024 Pleasure Month collection, that includes interviews with art-world queer and trans elders all through June.
Paul Wong appears to all the time be in movement. The 69-year-old artist, curator, and organizer co-founded the Satellite tv for pc Video Change Society, now VIVO Media Arts Middle, which celebrates its 51st anniversary this yr. However he’s not resting on his laurels: As he spoke over Zoom from his spacious Vancouver studio, he picked up his laptop computer and panned to black-and-white pictures and sheets of printed textual content pinned to his wall, a glimpse into the preparation of a Vancouver Artwork Gallery present he’s curating on the Japanese-Canadian photographer Tamio Wakayama.
Wong has additionally developed Pleasure in Chinatown, an annual collection of exhibitions and performances rooted in a 2018 residency on the Dr. Solar Yat-Sen Classical Chinese language Backyard in Vancouver. Whereas telling me this, he flung his distressed jean jacket open like a superhero, baring a black t-shirt with “Pleasure in Chinatown” printed in scorching pink. He lately premiered his first sound set up, “Be Like Sound” (2022) — a riff on Bruce Lee’s well-known quote, “Be like water.” Certainly, our dialog flowed freely with a fluidity that permeates his work at massive, blurring the boundaries between classes and experimenting with strategies of shifting by way of the world.
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Hyperallergic: Inform me about your apply.
Paul Wong: I’m a lens-based artist; I body the world by way of my lenses. I picked up a video digicam in highschool, and that was my major medium for many years. That’s how I thought, you understand? That’s what actually launched me to interdisciplinary efficiency, set up, pictures, sound — working with every kind of artists in entrance of, behind, and across the lens.
In reality, I at present have my first sound-only set up known as “Be Like Sound,” you understand, spinning off of Bruce Lee’s “Be like water” quote. I recorded completely different sorts of waters, from creeks to oceans to waves to rapids. I used to be considering that sound may take many sorts of shapes, can go round and thru issues. It was configured on this half circle of enormous spherical screens in a public plaza with 16 audio system. You may stroll by way of it, and all of the sounds and visuals play collectively in brief, non-synchronous loops, so it’s ever-changing.
You may keep, turn out to be absorbed, or you can simply stroll by way of it and by it. The inspiration was the disappearing sounds of Chinatown.
H: Talking of well-known quotes about water, I’m eager about that Heraclitus quote: “No man ever steps in the identical river twice, for it’s not the identical river and he’s not the identical man.”
PW: Sure — I consider my work form of like jazz. A free-form, improvisational dialog. I did a site-specific public artwork venture lately for the Vancouver Opera. I solid opera singers. Three of the 4 determine as queer, and one carried out his personal materials in drag. There was no storyboard, no starting, no center. It was about giving the performers the house to be themselves outdoors of the opera. It was in regards to the devices and voices, with out the trimmings of the opera stage. So what you hear will not be essentially what you see.
H: Are you able to inform me about how Vancouver’s annual Pleasure in Chinatown collection of exhibitions and performances started?
PW: It began with a year-long residency I did on the Dr. Solar Yat-Sen Classical Chinese language Backyard in 2018. It was transformative, each for myself and for the backyard, to shift from being solely a vacationer vacation spot to creating programming that was for the locals. I noticed it as a possibility to experiment with what it might be moreover a passive backyard.
H: That makes me consider water, too: its shiftiness, its capability to vary dynamically. A difficulty typically mentioned in Asian diasporic circles is that “authenticity” is conflated with custom, issues which can be legibly “Asian.” How did that affect your programming?
PW: It was about shifting away from the standard exhibitions of scrolls and brush portray to extra efficiency and modern types of artwork. I invited queer drag artists to collaborate with conventional Chinese language opera singers. In Chinese language opera, males historically performed the function of ladies. Now, ladies have additionally been taking part in males’s roles. That was the start of this concept of queering Chinatown and claiming an area the place we had been by no means welcome or seen.
H: It seems like collaboration is vital to your apply — a lot of your work appears to be about inviting others in.
PW: A part of being a mentor is inviting collaboration: that includes pan-Asian artists, fostering new artwork kinds, new sorts of collaborations. Creating incubators that don’t simply enable for queer Asian artists to make typical artwork kinds with some queer imagery, however actually to attempt to be one thing else.
H: What methods have you ever used to queer areas all through your profession?
PW: You recognize, I’m typically known as blunt. Being an elder and having that have now — it’s exhausting to say “no” once I ask as a result of I gained’t take no for a solution. I’ve all the time tried to create an area that’s about yeses.
I believe that goes again to my beginnings, to selecting up the video digicam when it was marginalized within the artwork world. We had been compelled to be outsiders, so we created our personal stuff in our personal methods and developed our personal audiences. We had been compelled to play outdoors, so we created our personal sandbox. I look again and I thank these gatekeepers. We networked with a lot of individuals in New York and around the globe who had been doing the identical factor: work that was radical, experimental, gender-bending. Work that was radically queer. That’s been the muse for every little thing I do. Queers created prolonged households for survival.
I used to be concerned in collectives and teams, and beginning artist’s areas — there was numerous help and funding in Canada. It allowed us to create a special form of artwork manufacturing that isn’t market-driven or primarily based on artwork festivals. There was ephemeral efficiency and work about politicized identities; these had been secure areas for us to play, experiment, and evolve as artists, directors, and facilitators. You had been taking a look at my stuff, and I used to be taking a look at yours.
Inside areas like Video-Inn, there have been all the time unbelievable queer voices. We had a library the place anyone might are available and watch this work, a few of which was interviews with trans individuals or efficiency artists who had been doing extraordinarily queer performances. Our mandate was all the time to supply gear, entry, and coaching for marginalized voices. Satellite tv for pc Video Change Society was an unbelievable playground. I additionally frolicked at Western Entrance, which was extra into conceptual efficiency and experimental artwork. These had been critical breeding grounds for mentorship. Folks got here and went as visiting artists who allowed me to look at, take heed to, and play with others.
H: Who had been a number of the individuals whose work attracted you?
PW: I used to be drawn to the freaks within the artwork world. Within the early ’70s, once I was a teen, it was the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Lou Reed. Andy Warhol’s Manufacturing facility. All of them appeared like, wow — this isn’t well mannered society. The Dalessandros, the Taylor Meads, the Vivas. Individuals who had turned their again on the White center class. These had been nonbinary individuals, pansexuals, individuals who gave the impression to be having numerous enjoyable, individuals who had been lovely. And within the ’80s, the AIDS disaster was foundational. That’s a interval that I lived by way of, fearfully, and got here out the opposite finish. I take into consideration what was misplaced throughout that interval — and what was made. Folks like Normal Thought, and Gran Fury. The work of ACT UP.
And now, Kent Monkman. He’s somebody who I’ve recognized for a few years. He’s a painter, a multidisciplinary, Indigenous artist, who’s mischievous and doing these ranges of critique round colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and queerness.
H: When did you your self come out?
PW: There was no nice massive “YouTube” second — that appears to be the factor today. I used to be attracted to being an artist very early on. The making of artwork, be it drawing or video, was an early escape. It allowed me to focus, and the remaining simply … disappeared. It represented a sure form of freedom and inside that freedom was self-expression: being no matter you would possibly wish to be.