FACULTY SABBATICAL TRIENNIAL

Faculty

FACULTY SABBATICAL TRIENNIAL

Adrian Wong

Associate Professor, Sculpture

Adrian Wong has been teaching at SAIC since 2018. He took his sabbatical during the Spring 2024.

Adrian Wong was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work is based in videos, sculpture, and installations often drawing from the artists relationship to his environment. He explores overlapping narratives and intricate histories through research based methods, often pulling from specific subjects, one of these being 1970s television shows. Wong was based in Hong Kong from 2005 to 2017, where he was the co-founder and director of Embassy Projects, an arts consultancy and independent production studio. His work has been shown at different exhibitions including: the Drawing Center, New York; Kuandu Museum, Taipei; Kunsthalle Wien; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunstverein, Hamburg; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Saatchi Gallery, London; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. His videos have been screened at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, and Kunsthalle Wien. His work is included in the Uli Sigg Collection (Lucerne), the DSL Collection (Paris), the Kadist Foundation Collection (San Francisco), Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong), M+ Museum Collection (Hong Kong), and the Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing). He has been awarded the HKADC Project Grant 2010 and 2015, the 2013-2014 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and the Xian Rui Artist Excellence Award, 2013.

Education

MFA, 2005, Yale University
MA, Stanford

Notable Classes Taught:

Graduate Sculpture & Ceramics Critique Seminar, taught since 2018
Advanced Sculptural Practices Studio, taught since 2018
Graduate Projects: Sculpture, taught since 2018

Adrian Wong - Still from With Love from Hong Kong

Still from With Love from Hong Kong, Episode 1. 2025.

Adrian Wong - Still from With Love from Hong Kong

Still from With Love from Hong Kong, Episode 1. 2025.

Adrian Wong - Still from With Love from Hong Kong

Still from With Love from Hong Kong, Episode 2. 2025.

Adrian Wong - Still from With Love from Hong Kong

Still from With Love from Hong Kong, Episode 2. 2025.

With Love from Hong Kong extends Wong’s ongoing investigation into pulp television and cinema, highlighting the intersections between these media tropes and his own family tree. This entry in the project focuses on soap operas. “Soap operas,” ubiquitous throughout the 1980s and 1990s, are characterized by their open-ended narrative, seriality, melodrama, sentimentality, and an interlacing of sensationalism (intrigue, scandal, supernatural elements) and prosaicism (uneventful and drawn-out storylines depicting daily life). In the United States, storylines focus on glamorous families embroiled in forbidden romances and betrayal. But various countries have adapted the genre to their own cultural agendas. In the United Kingdom, the most popular soaps are set in working class environments. In South and Central America, telenovelas are often co-opted by government authorities to reinforce social-cultural messaging aligned with their policies. And in Asia (notably K-Dramas, J-Dramas, C-Dramas, and Lakorn), historical melodramas relay moralistic tales fueled by nostalgia for simpler times, when good and evil were clearly demarcated. In 1986, during the golden age of the televised melodrama, his grandmother immigrated from Hong Kong to suburban Chicago. Despite her lack of familiarity with the cultural context of the United States and a near-complete lack of English comprehension, she spent the last decades of her life immersing in the fantasy worlds of American soaps, sometimes blurring their storylines and those of her own daily activities. Wong’s work mines the genre to create a series of vignettes of his grandmother’s life, using her lived experience as a point of departure, and the exhibition space as a site for the dramatization of stories produced with a team of scriptwriters, production crew, and actors experienced in Hong Kong television drama—mirroring and adopting her frame of reference in reverse.