Stanley Wong: a collage of faces and places

An original green ping-pong table surrounded by rows of steel lockers containing books has been a feature in all of Stanley Wong’s previous studios. Doubling up as a large desk and cheap conference table, Wong’s choice of table demonstrates his practical approach to work and a stripped-back aesthetic. He says that ‘a green background is good for seeing art, green is good for the eyes.’ However, the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a huge shift in his working life.

‘After my retrospective exhibition at Hong Kong’s Heritage Museum in late 2019, I didn’t want the same feelings, the same belongings. It had all become baggage,’ Wong explains as we chat in the communal lounge adjacent to his studio. Gone is the ping-pong table, as well as 75% of his 4,000 books. His new studio is a small office of just four desks and computers at Eaton House, a coworking space within the redesigned, faux-1960s ambience of the Eaton hotel. Previously a standard tourist hotel near Temple Street’s night market, it has been transformed, now also housing exhibition, music, and event venues with an edgy, gender-fluid openness that appeals to Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan young.

I first met Wong around the time I opened my own gallery in 1997, and over the years we have got to know each other well. My most vivid memory remains of him, camera in hand, at the former government supplies depot in Oil Street in 1999. This was a pivotal time for Hong Kong’s art scene. For 18 special months, the warehouses at Oil Street were rented out at low cost so that the area could briefly become a vibrant place for artists, photographers, designers, and architects, and for nurturing new arts organizations. The newly opened Artist Commune and 1aspace became pivotal anchors, organizing monthly exhibitions and events, while other studios coordinated impromptu parties, film screenings, and performances. A lasting image from that time were the (fake) crocodiles placed for a group exhibition on the isolated pedestals of the Island Eastern Corridor at the seafront of Oil Street, isolated by the water of Victoria Harbor.

Wong missed most of Oil Street’s activities as he had been working in Singapore at the time. But he returned to live in Hong Kong to see the final weeks before the site’s closure and sale for redevelopment. His photographs and book Before and Ever After: 522 Days of Oil Street (2001) almost single-handedly recorded the site for posterity – and in turn a crucial part of Hong Kong’s art history – capturing the faded ambience of its vacant rooms, warehouse detritus, remnants of artist installations, and layers of history. The legacy of those Oil Street days is a link with Hong Kong’s current art scene: Many of today’s artists, including Wong, experienced a creative breakout in the wake of Oil Street’s energy and were motivated to find studio space in the city’s industrial buildings.

In the early 1990s, Wong adopted the pseudonym anothermountainman, after Bada Shanren, a traditional Chinese painter who lived during the crossover between the Ming and Qing dynasties. He chose this other name to distinguish his photography and art projects from his commercial work. After studying design and technology at the Hong Kong Technical Teachers’ College, Wong worked as a graphic designer for five years, then was invited to be a creative director at a leading advertising company. Advertising opened horizons and piqued his artistic temperament. In 2002, he cofounded a film production company and in 2008 opened his own design and branding studio, which allowed time for personal and artistic projects. For Wong, years in advertising taught him an important lesson: ‘When putting out a message, you can’t force the message. The client will decide. And the client is the end user, the public!’

Wong’s artwork often shows a tension between the pragmatic world of design and the expressive freedoms of art. ‘I am by nature a very objective, not subjective, person,’ he says, but his artistic sensibility is invariably tempered by his beliefs as a Buddhist and his appreciation ‘that there is beauty in all things.’ The simplicity of found and discarded objects – the broken and flawed, discolored and destroyed – is a dominant narrative in his artistic work. Attracted by their intrinsic beauty, Wong has always collected interesting objects from the street and in nature. In a series of photographs, Between Life & Death, begun in 2004, he matched these collected objects into compositions that range from abstraction to whimsical realism. Take Cobra, a broken pair of reading glasses arranged with found coiled copper wiring to give the impression of a snake with bulging eyes.  

The aesthetic of decay is also seen in Wong’s series of photographs of lanweilou, literally ‘rotten buildings,’ taken over six years from 2006 to 2012 across cities in mainland China and Asia. The images offer a deeper moral story: Lanweilou is a Shanghainese expression referring to abandoned or partially completed high-rise buildings that began construction in times of economic expansion but remain incomplete due to financial problems. The term has entered a China-wide vernacular to refer to any situation that has suffered a bad outcome due to greed or excess. In Wong’s series, titled Lanwei, photographs of these buildings often also include an arranged tableau of people and objects, adding a touch of fantasy, a greater sense of unreality, which emphasizes the strangeness of these high-rise monuments to greed.

If Lanwei symbolize excess, then Wong’s longstanding redwhiteblue series of artwork might be located at the other end of the spectrum. He began the series in the early 2000s, after observing the practical portability and permutations of the humble tricolored tarpaulin that first appeared in Hong Kong as cheap plastic sheeting in the 1980s. A simple covering that is often seen propped up on bamboo supports against wind, rain, and the sun, the iconic material’s hardiness and flexibility have only increased its ubiquity in the years since, with its utilitarian uses now including cheap bags. This combination of strength and resilience is, Wong believes, symbolic of the ‘Hong Kong spirit.’ He has assiduously documented the many uses of ‘redwhiteblue’ and has pushed its symbolic meaning by producing designed objects, elaborate installations, and readymade paintings with it, making use of the fabric’s minimalist grid. These were best seen when he was one of Hong Kong’s representative artists at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Wong’s latest project captures the isolation many people have experienced around the world due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a series of commissioned portraits for this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, he depicts ‘togetherness’ by photographing pairings of Hong Kongers; some are from the art scene, others from the public, as in one image that brings together a well-known small design shop retailer and an unknown member of the public. Using a simple, muted color background, subjects are paired in various standing poses or as profiled head shots with neutral facial expressions, conveying an uncanny universality of togetherness. ‘Togetherness as a topic could be cheesy, but these portraits are a strong collage of faces and colors,’ Wong points out. ‘Covid has been so negative, creating such a mysterious fear. These portraits bring two people randomly together. Photographed, they are now intentionally joined.’

Amid uncertainty, and with a wealth of commercial, personal, and cultural projects behind him, Wong describes the future as a blank page. ‘I intend to embrace what’s next,’ he tells me, ‘although what’s next is a big question mark.’ After all, he points out, ‘The world is changing.’

John Batten lives in Hong Kong and is a heritage and urban planning activist, art critic, and photographer who previously ran his own gallery (1997-2010).

Art Basel Hong Kong runs from May 21st until May 23rd. 

As part of 'Art Basel Hong Kong: Live', galleries will be presenting work on the online viewing room platform from May 19-23, 2021. Our exclusive VIP preview runs from May 19, 2pm HKT to May 21, 4pm HKT. Public days will follow through Sunday, May 23, 12 midnight HKT. For more information, please visit https://www.artbasel.com/hong-kong 

All images: Art Basel Hong Kong 2021 campaign by anothermountainman (Stanley Wong).