OBJECTIVE
PRAF Participatory is an initiative to commission art projects from invited international artists that are developed with the participation of local art students. As part of its intend to supplement conventional pedagogical methods in art schools, this initiative is intended to facilitate engagement with internationally renowned artists, by immersing young artists in the making of a collaborative work of art that expands their understanding of their own practice.
PRAF Participatory Programme is designed to encourage increased conversation between India and the global art scene. While residency programmes have become increasingly relevant to the arts in India with annual residency programmes that support Indian artists and curators in other countries to develop their practices there aren’t as many opportunities that focus on visits by prominent global figures to India with the sole purpose of continued dialogue with a broader segment of the local arts community.
PRAF intends to bridge that gap by facilitating engagement for emerging artists with global figures within India.
For the year 2018, PRAF is proud to invite the Chinese Canadian multimedia artist Paul Wong to exhibit some of his key works in Delhi and share his working process with the local audience through a conversation with the artist Amitesh Grover. Thereafter, Wong would continue his India tour by participating in Srishti Interim 2018, a program launched by our partner, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (Bengaluru) that gives an opportunity to young art students to interact with and learn from established international artists whilst working on collaborative art projects with them.
'Paul Wong: 3 Public Art Projects 'is an exhibition that seeks to introduce India to the Canadian artist, Paul Wong. He has been creating daring work for over 40 years, pushing the boundaries of conventional cultural stereotypes and art. He has produced large-scale interdisciplinary artworks in traditional galleries and unexpected public spaces since the 1970s. His work subverts stereotypes in form, language, content, and context.
This exhibition of four recent works exemplifies Paul’s multifaceted artistic process. All these works have been initiatives of public art projects, accessibly bringing in the public and community within the conversation. Five Octave Range (2017), commissioned by Vancouver Opera, and Year of GIF (2013), commissioned by Surrey Art Gallery, showcases Paul’s large-scale site-specific installation video work that has made him a pioneer in that field. His current project, 身在唐人街 / Occupying Chinatown (2018/19), commissioned by City of Vancouver’s explores Paul’s relationship to identity, heritage, and language. 媽媽的藥櫃/Mother’s Cupboard and 父字/Father’s Words allows viewers intimate insight into Chinese diaspora practices within a Canadian colonial context.
Key Dates:
- 15 November, 2018 | 5:00 – 6:00 pm: Presentation of works by Paul Wong at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
- 16 November, 2018 | 6:00 – 7:00 pm: Paul Wong in conversation with the performance-based artist Amitesh Grover followed by the official opening of his exhibition at the Shrine Empire.
- 19 November – 12 December, 2018: Paul Wong's participation in Srishti Interim 2018, Bengaluru.
- 24 November, 2018 | Evening: Artist talk by Paul Wong at 1 Shanthi road Studio Gallery, Bengaluru.
- 4 December, 2018 | 6:00 – 7:00 pm: Artist talk by Paul Wong at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai.
- 18 December, 2018 | 4:30 - 5:30 pm: Artist talk by Paul Wong at Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kochi.
Paul Wong is a media-maestro making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award-winning artist and curator known for pioneering early visual and media art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, and organizing events, festivals, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s. Wong has produced projects throughout North America, Europe and Asia.
His works in public collections include the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa), The Audain Art Museum (Whistler, BC), the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Whitney Museum (New York). Public art commissions including the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. He was the winner of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art 1992, the first recipient of the Transforming Art Award from the Asian Heritage Foundation 2002 and the inaugural winner of the Trailblazer Expressions Award in 2003, created by Heritage Canad, National Film Boad and CHUM Limited (one of Canadaʼs leading media companies). In 2005 he received the Governor Generalʼs Award in Visual and Media Art. In 2008 was awarded Best Canadian Film or Video at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. In 2016, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts.
He officially launched his year-long residency on April 2018, 身在唐人街/Occupying Chinatown, at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden as part of the City of Vancouver’s Artist-Initiated Commission series for public art.
Private/Public/Lives is an exhibition that identifies a strand of ideas that have consistently informed artist-provocateur Paul Wong’s practice. The selection of recent public art projects presented here, edited and reformatted for gallery viewing, has also been an exercise in unraveling the associations and relational dialogues that emerge when these works are viewed together in a single space.
From early, iconic works such as 60 Unit: Bruise (1976) to his ongoing project Occupying Chinatown (on view here), the artist has foregrounded the personal as political. The ostensibly simple, yet radically vulnerable gesture of making public the private transgressions and encounters of his body/identity has also been a process of queering histories and spaces by exposing what is conventionally marginalized and hidden in the recesses of the everyday. His practice makes obvious that what is considered ‘invisible’, is in fact a refusal to render visible what is in plain sight. This liminal, overlapping relationship between the intimate and the open is made more complex in the work Year of GIF. For the course of one year, the artist engaged in spontaneously documenting and making GIFs of what he encountered around him — photographs, shapes, objects, news stories, and self-reflexive traces of his own process of engaging with the visual medium. Speaking through a format generated on a smartphone for a public that will consume it via isolated interfaces, Year of GIF comments on the conundrum of the age of the social media — where private is public — as perhaps taking a toxic turn through an excess of the possibility of 'anonymous', wide, address.
Paul Wong’s interests in cutting edge, inter-disciplinary media as well as traditional media and public space, are also indicative of an interest in language, and the semantic possibilities of various forms of engagement. In Five Octave Range, the artist asserts the universal resonance and appeal of the opera, despite it being limited by access and language. As part of Occupying Chinatown, despite not speaking the language the letters are written in, Wong worked with a translator to decipher the 700 letters written to his mother from various sources in China. Wong exhibited intimate traces of his Chinese heritage on transit shelters across Vancouver to challenge and celebrate a reality that has been pushed to the margins by historical discrimination. Such everyday records also become material in Mother’s Cupboard, where he photographed his mother’s unconscious rewriting of signifiers of mainstream patterns of production and consumption such as jars of mayonnaise and instant coffee by relabeling and refilling them with Chinese herbs and homemade medicines. His installations of these photographs of a quotidian habit in public spaces perform reclamation of disappearing histories.Private/Public/Lives is an exhibition that identifies a strand of ideas that have consistently informed artist-provocateur Paul Wong’s practice. The selection of recent public art projects presented here, edited and reformatted for gallery viewing, has also been an exercise in unraveling the associations and relational dialogues that emerge when these works are viewed together in a single space.
From early, iconic works such as 60 Unit: Bruise (1976) to his ongoing project Occupying Chinatown (on view here), the artist has foregrounded the personal as political. The ostensibly simple, yet radically vulnerable gesture of making public the private transgressions and encounters of his body/identity has also been a process of queering histories and spaces by exposing what is conventionally marginalized and hidden in the recesses of the everyday. His practice makes obvious that what is considered ‘invisible’, is in fact a refusal to render visible what is in plain sight. This liminal, overlapping relationship between the intimate and the open is made more complex in the work Year of GIF. For the course of one year, the artist engaged in spontaneously documenting and making GIFs of what he encountered around him — photographs, shapes, objects, news stories, and self-reflexive traces of his own process of engaging with the visual medium. Speaking through a format generated on a smartphone for a public that will consume it via isolated interfaces, Year of GIF comments on the conundrum of the age of the social media — where private is public — as perhaps taking a toxic turn through an excess of the possibility of ‘anonymous’, wide, address.
Paul Wong’s interests in cutting edge, inter-disciplinary media as well as traditional media and public space, are also indicative of an interest in language, and the semantic possibilities of various forms of engagement. In Five Octave Range, the artist asserts the universal resonance and appeal of the opera, despite it being limited by access and language. As part of Occupying Chinatown, despite not speaking the language the letters are written in, Wong worked with a translator to decipher the 700 letters written to his mother from various sources in China. Wong exhibited intimate traces of his Chinese heritage on transit shelters across Vancouver to challenge and celebrate a reality that has been pushed to the margins by historical discrimination. Such everyday records also become material in Mother’s Cupboard, where he photographed his mother’s unconscious rewriting of signifiers of mainstream patterns of production and consumption such as jars of mayonnaise and instant coffee by relabeling and refilling them with Chinese herbs and homemade medicines. His installations of these photographs of a quotidian habit in public spaces perform reclamation of disappearing histories.
