Wong is, quite literally, a shit disturber: he has even created ingestible capsules filled with silver leaf that are intended to make a user’s feces sparkle. This example effectively illustrates one of his favourite targets?—?conventional notions of luxury. He has produced crystal chandeliers coated in white rubber, pearl earrings dipped in black rubber, gift wrap made with original Andy Warhol screen prints, and a ring where the diamond is hidden on the inside of the band. But interpreting Wong’s objects as out-and-out attacks on luxury goods would be a mistake. After all, he admits to lusting after the extravagant objects himself. “We all have this desire for having the best of something,” he says. “But we’ve gotten to a point where you’re not really even appreciating the object. Pearls, having them rubber coated, leaves you as the only person who knows what you have underneath. There’s something nice about having $5,000 earrings on. There’s something even better about knowing that you’re the only one who knows.”
And he was ecstatic when the clothing and accessories design house Burberry copied his own ripoff of the company’s tartan. Because Burberry was notorious for rabidly defending its exclusive ownership of the telltale plaid, Wong decided to confuse matters by buying a Burberry shirt, cutting it up, and making his own pin-back buttons with the material (and later, with photocopies of the material). Who owned the tartan then? Hipsters in New York went crazy for them, and the buttons were soon being paraded through city streets affixed to hundreds of bags and jean jackets. But rather than suing Wong, Burberry stole the idea back and put the buttons in its ads. The pleasure of having Kate Moss promote his creations was something Wong had never dreamed of.
“That bad-boy phase is gone, hopefully,” Wong tells me when I meet him at the Bound and Unbound gallery in New York. He has been quietly paying his dues here for the past six years by assembling works from Fluxus, an anti-art art movement founded by George Maciunas in the early 1960s. When Maciunas died in 1978, he left behind piles of material and instructions for unfinished projects. Wong took up the task of completing them. One of his favourites is A Box of Smile by Yoko Ono — a simple cube of black plastic with a mirror on the inside that has a knack for making people grin.
Painstakingly assembling thirty-year-old art projects certainly doesn’t mesh with the bad-boy reputation, and neither does Wong’s demeanour. He is short, sprightly, clean-cut, friendly, and extraordinarily polite. Besides the Holzer tattoo, the only other hint of subversion is a tiny square tattoo on his chin, which could be mistaken for a mole. It’s actually a memento of the three years he spent in the University of Toronto’s architecture program before dropping out to study sculpture at the Cooper Union in New York. “I was really into the modern square,” he says. “And Ithought if I could end it right there and then, I could start doing everything else. That was a milestone?—?being able to walk away from architecture more than halfway through.”
But that wasn’t the end of his soul searching. In 2004, at the height of his popularity but nonetheless feeling that he was in a creative rut, Wong announced his retirement from art and design, claiming he would return to Vancouver to begin a career driving trucks. “I was getting a little tired of hearing myself,” he says. “I had enough examples of where I was coming from, and it got to a point where people just wanted to see more of the same thing. And that really was a problem.” He decided that if he didn’t have anything new to say, he wouldn’t say anything at all.
Of course, since I’m sitting in a Manhattan gallery, flipping through a portfolio of his latest work when he tells me about all this, the whole notion of retirement is a little difficult to swallow. But when I suggest that it was only a joke, he pulls out a photo to demonstrate just how sincere he was?—?the shot shows the self-described “tiny little guy” in the seat of a transport truck, clutching the top of a monstrous stick shift. He hasn’t earned his licence just yet but says he did take lessons out West and still plans to return to trucking someday. And even though he has taken up art and design in New York once again, he hasn’t produced any solo work since the retirement announcement, choosing to focus on collaborative projects instead.
Still, his touch is readily apparent in his latest creations. With Ken Courtney (a.k.a. Ju$t Another Rich Kid), he recently designed the Indulgences line?—?everyday objects dipped in gold to make them more precious, including Bic pen caps, toy cars, and Playboy stir sticks. With Niels Bendtsen, a veteran furniture designer in Vancouver, Wong has created the Pentagon sectional sofa, which can be put together in the same shape as that fortress of US military power. When people kick their shoes off to dive inside, the footwear creates a pile of rubble, just like the one at the real Pentagon five years ago.
It’s this play between humour and serious commentary, realized through brash, smart-alecky gestures, that characterizes Wong’s best work. “Object after object, they always have a sense of humour and a lot of irreverence, and sometimes even anger in them,” says Paola Antonelli, the architecture and design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art who recently selected a couple of Wong’s pieces for an exhibition called Safe: Design Takes On Risk. “I like them for that reason — because they’re very delicate and very brutal at the same time.” Wong’s Ballistic Rose Brooch, which was one of Antonelli’s picks, is a perfect example. Featuring a flower made from black, bulletproof nylon, and an underlying promise to protect a wearer’s heart, the object is pure poetry.
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