Tobias Wong
Vancouver-born artist and designer mocked excess on an international stage.
Tobias Wong and Niels Bendsten, “Pentagon Sofa,” 2005-2006 (photo courtesy Inform Interiors)
Tobias Wong liked to call himself a paraconceptualist. A unique, puckish figure who relentlessly questioned authorship and originality, he engaged in free-range collaborations that both critiqued and embraced consumerism. With a prankster’s elan, he also collapsed boundaries between art and design, straddling those disciplines with clever and provocative works.
Wong gets an in-depth look in the Museum of Vancouver’s exhibition All We Want Is More: The Tobias Wong Project, on view until July. Wong was born in Vancouver in 1974, the same year Mr. Peanut ran for mayor, and was heir to several art movements that had found purchase in Vancouver in the ’60s and ’70s, particularly Fluxus and Dada. His riffs on fashion, luxury brands and international design led him to New York in 1997, where his neither-fish-nor-fowl career flourished.
Tobias Wong in his New York apartment in 2004. (photo by Dean Kaufman)
Wong oversaw the creation of many small precious objects, beautifully crafted and presented. Easy to parse and designed to elicit a laugh, they critique Western culture’s obsession with luxury goods and the empty promise that such objects can create happiness. His pieces could be cutting (diamond rings with the jewel embedded on the inside or mounted so a razor-sharp point could be used in self defense) absurdist (a gold-plated on/off switch sealed in an acrylic display case) and amusingly practical (a light-refracting New Age rain chain built with leftover crystal from a collaborative chandelier project he did with Swarovksi).
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Tobias Wong and Ju$t Another Rich Kid, “Coke Spoon 02,” 2005
bronze, 18K gold – 1978 McDonald coffee stirrer (loan courtesy Phyllis Chan, photo by CITIZEN:Citizen)
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Copy of cease-and-desist letter for use of McDonald’s spoon from February 2007. (courtesy Philip Wood)
Wong was fond of appropriation and ready-mades. Some pieces tested the tolerance of corporate powerhouses whose products were repurposed. Coke Spoon #2 is a gold-plated 70’s-era McDonald’s plastic spoon, part of a collaborative series, Indulgences, that he made with Ju$t Another Rich Kid. The concept was so on the nose that McDonald’s sent a cease-and-desist letter, which becomes part of the display.
The show’s entryway features industrial shelving to create a pop-up look that also echoes the accessible and affordable décor Wong used in his home studio. Towering vitrines built from metal racks and pressboard are an inspired curatorial choice. But Wong also seemed to genuinely enjoy the allure of luxury goods and high-end home furnishings. How else to explain his painstaking attention to detail and presentation?
My favourite piece is Pentagon Sofa, a collaboration with Vancouver furniture designer Niels Bendtsen. Deliberately impenetrable, it resembles a ’70s conversation-pit sectional, and was part of a series made in the wake of former U.S. president George W. Bush’s War on Terror. The series also includes a chrome-plated box cutter, a reference to the tools used to hijack planes on 9/11. Certainly, these kinds of projects are open to debate about the commodification of tragedy. The sofa now exists solely as an image because it was stolen before its real-world debut at a Brazilian design show.
Line Up (Tobias Wong, Amelia Bauer, Tim Dubitsky and Robert the Saint Phalle), “Non-Mailable Matter, (pages 60-61)” no date
from “The Book of Stamps” (76 pages) Cabinet Books, New York (Museum of Vancouver purchase, photo by Amelia Bauer)
In a nod to the mail-art movement, Wong co-founded Line Up, a collective akin to Vancouver-based Image Bank, initiated in 1970 by Vincent Trasov, Michael Morris and Gary Lee-Nova. Mail-art maven Anna Banana would also identify with this work, particularly a limited-edition book project called Non-Mailable Material, comprised of sheets of stamps featuring different objects the U.S. Postal Service prohibits sending by airmail, including, it should be noted, kittens.
The exhibition has some 70 works, mostly from Wong’s estate. Text panels touch on his early years in Vancouver, his time at New York’s Cooper Union, where he studied sculpture, graduating in 2000, and the influence his sexuality (he was gay) had on his work. It’s the museum’s second exhibition about Wong. The earlier show, Object(ing), a decade ago, was his first Vancouver retrospective. This new show dives deeper into his personal story and more fully reclaims him as a hometown boy, revisiting his childhood abodes and favourite haunts. And, as the museum suggests, recent societal, technological and environmental events are transforming the way people respond to his work.
Wong made his mark before the Instagramification of contemporary life. Would he be a social media influencer today, feeding us provocative posts filled with glittering objects? Or would the contrarian in him lead him to pursue impossible-to-replicate forms? Sadly, we’ll never know. Wong died in 2010 at age 35. His death was ruled a suicide, but his friends and family believe it was an accident due to a sleepwalking condition.
Several years before his death, Wong, feeling that he was spinning his creative wheels, announced his retirement from art and design, saying he would become a truck driver. He went as far as taking driving lessons but, in the end, kept working in his studio. Perhaps that was his first inkling of how commodification would continue to spiral through Western societies, growing exponentially like a virus, infecting everything and collapsing all boundaries. Maybe he felt his work was done. What is left to parody, after all, when everyday life is more absurd than anything a creative intervention could offer? ■
All We Want Is More: The Tobias Wong Project at the Museum of Vancouver from Nov. 17, 2022, through July 2023.
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