An Interview with Paul Wong
Audain Prize: “Much more than a celebration of the individual, it’s a celebration of the visual arts.”
11.15.23
Approaching its twentieth year in 2023, the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts has, to date, honoured twenty of BC’s top artists through its prestigious annual award, as well as emerging artists through the accompanying Audain Travel Awards for students in university-level arts programs. Ahead of this year’s Audain Prize ceremony, which was administered by the Audain Art Museum on September 25, 2023 in Vancouver, we had an opportunity to sit down with 2016 award recipient and later juror, Paul Wong, to discuss his unique perspective on the Prize.
Paul Wong is an icon of Vancouver’s visual arts scene, and is widely recognized for a longstanding artistic practice which spans five decades of video, performance, installation, and photography, among other prominent interdisciplinary achievements. Paul was a co-founding director of the Satellite Video Exchange Society, now known as VIVO Media Arts Centre, reflecting fondly on the society as an “experimental, DIY video art centre that provided the stimulus – the collective, the social, and the technical tools – to engage with the video medium.”
Having just graduated from high school when he became involved with the Satellite Video Exchange Society, Wong quickly found himself at the forefront of what was a new and progressive movement for the era. This formative, early-career experience, explains Wong, provided him with “the context to engage with people, places, and technologies, and to work experimentally outside mainstream constructs of television, film, documentary, and visual art performance.”
In 2016, Paul Wong was honoured as the recipient of the Audain Prize for Visual Arts, twelve years after the inception of the award. Initially, Wong recalls acknowledging that he was “perhaps, age-wise, one of the younger recipients” in the history of the award, a sentiment that was echoed playfully by 2023 Audain Prize recipient Dana Claxton during her own recent award acceptance remarks.
Often referred to colloquially as an award for ‘senior artists,’ Wong’s ensuing experience as a juror for the Audain Prize instilled in him the award’s broader significance, extending far beyond the seniority of an artist. What a juror considers, explains Wong, is that recipients have “become very accomplished at what they do. There’s a certain maturity in form, in content, and in being an artist in the community.” At the time of his award, Wong had been practicing as a professional artist and actively engaged in the artist community for over 40 years.
“These artists,” Wong emphasizes, “they are exceptional in their area.”
It is the recognition of Paul Wong’s ‘exceptionality in his area’ that exemplifies the critical cultural and social impact of the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. Representative of the Audain Foundation’s commitment to raising the profile of Canadian artists, the 2016 award announcement marked a transformative moment in the history of the Prize. “When I was the surprise recipient of the Audain Prize,” shares Wong, “I think it was a shift. I’ve heard that from many people and I certainly felt it.” Up until that point, the award had recognized “more conventional and traditional types of artistic practices.”
“It was extraordinary to be selected and to be positioned, celebrated, and validated among the history of other recipients,” explains Wong. “My practice was interdisciplinary, and a lot of the work was performative, ephemeral, and not commercial, or even studio-based.” What Wong came to reflect upon in receiving the award, perhaps most profoundly, is that when “we celebrate an artist, we validate them among their communities, their histories, their friends, their families, and their colleagues.” This celebration, Wong describes, “helps to validate all of those people and those art forms.”
“The Audain Prize,” explains Wong, “is much more than a celebration of the individual, it’s a celebration of the community, it’s a celebration of the visual arts.”
In recent years, the Audain Prize has gained increasing recognition for its efforts to support a collective reimagining of public engagement with the visual arts across Canada, with a particular focus on celebrating the accomplishments of British Columbia’s artists. The Audain Prize is exemplary of the private sector’s ability to support the visual arts and the celebration of the role that art plays in a thriving society.
“Here in Vancouver, and in Canada,” Wong underscores, “certainly from my perspective, there’s been 50 years of making art that is not solely commercially driven and validated. I think that is because we’ve had a unique and robust private and public funding sector that hassupported projects…that are beyond what is of market value. I’m not sure that a great work of art, or a great work of an artist’s career is going to be long-remembered for how much money they made,” he adds. “Ultimately, it’s about the work, the legacy of that work, the impact that work has made on the viewers, and how they engage with that and experience it.”
When asked about the potential impact of the Audain Prize on British Columbia’s artists for years to come, Wong swiftly replies, “I think the key word here is respect. I think when you are recognized by your peers and celebrated in this kind of way, it’s respect.”
Alongside the Audain Prize are the Audain Travel Awards, administered by post-secondary partners from from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Okanagan, University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Created to encourage travel to view and study art, the Awards are provided to young artists enrolled in a full-time fine arts program at the undergraduate or graduate level. In keeping with the reverberating impact of the Audain Prize, Wong emphasizes that “significant travel prizes allow young artists to live a dream. To do research, to be engaged in an out of body experience for that period of time. Those kinds of opportunities can be the difference between making or breaking somebody.”
“Go, go. Do it.”
— Paul Wong adds, in closing, a few short words of encouragement to the many young artists whose aspirations are aimed high.