Tony WONG's works flow like a river, winding their way from Hong Kong through Chicago and Berkeley, ultimately converging into the hustle and bustle of New York. In his early years, he drifted on the margins of cities, as well as within the seams of culture and identity. For a long time, he has been situated within the context of neo-expressionism: heavy brushstrokes, vivid subject matter, and emotionally charged colors resonate with personal memories and experiences. However, compared to his mature works, his early creative journey, especially during his studies and life in the 1970s and 1980s, has hardly been systematically examined. This was a time of delays, where ethnic consciousness, class structures, and cultural differences interwove into the fabric of daily life, making "integration" an unfinished and ongoing process. Against this backdrop, Tony WONG 's art gradually unfolded, from the construction of everyday materials in collage works to the absent detachment in composition, hints of social relationships, and emotional tensions interspersed with joy and humor, each painting seems to explore the boundaries between the self and the world. The evolution of form and theme not only marks stylistic development but also reflects a subjectivity that remains unfinished and still on the journey. In this text, "America" refers not merely to geography or nationalism but becomes a concept yet to be fully reached and still in the process of formation; Tony WONG 's art is shaped between these tensions and explorations.
I. The Departure Yet to Arrive: From Hong Kong to America
In early 1960, Tony WONG relocated to Hong Kong with his family. At that time, Hong Kong was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization, with a wave of immigrants bringing both prosperity and reshaping the urban landscape and lifestyle. Young Tony spent his spare time in the studio of Ling Hai Art School, gripping his paintbrush with blossoming passion and curiosity, each line seemingly exploring the order and chaos of the world. Concurrently, his comic works published in newspapers became early experiments in the depiction of character forms, narrative scenes, and symbolic expressions. The density of lines and the weight of brushstrokes in these cartoons not only mirrored his perception of the world but also laid the foundation for his sensitivity to form and emotional tension in later painting languages. These works recorded the daily life of the city and the existence of ordinary people, revealing the subtle rhythms of psychological pulses.
In the 1960s, the influx of crowds in Hong Kong brought multiple perspectives, with language, memory, and lifestyles intermingling, causing the city to expand between congestion and hope. It served as both a safe haven and a window of imagination to the Western world. In 1966, Tony WONG began his journey to America, a decision that heralded his entry into a vastly different cultural context, where artistic language would unfold into new variations. At that time, America was steeped in political turbulence, with anti-Vietnam War movements and civil rights struggles sweeping campuses and society, subtly influencing the atmosphere of art education. In 1968, Tony WONG enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), officially embarking on his artistic journey. The school emphasized experimental and anti-classical training principles, fostering a campus culture that encouraged “any form can be art.” This environment inspired students to center their artistic identities on the individual, forming a unique artistic positioning distinct from New York's minimalism, conceptual art, and pop art, which laid the conceptual and formal groundwork for Tony WONG 's subsequent creations.
II. The Unfolding of the Creative Journey: The SAIC Era
In the 1970s, the Chicago Imagists were at their peak, and the American art scene was infused with a rethinking of images, bodies, and everyday experiences. In this context, Tony WONG adopted collage as an experimental visual method to address the cultural and perceptual states he faced. By collecting, categorizing, and reorganizing fragments of images, he sought material from everyday life to build a personal visual database. These fragments picked from the world's disarray also attempted to integrate Eastern memories with Western imagery into his scrapbook, evolving from initial “merely collected collages” to more consciously composed works. These collages represented not only the juxtaposition of cultural visuals but also a re-translation of his identity and memory, transforming images into a medium for understanding the self. His scrapbooks encompass a wide range, continuing the experimental spirit of the SAIC while also showcasing the unique sensitivity of a cross-cultural artist. Through his collages, Tony WONG constructed his own universe, redefining the relationship between the self and the world within the fragments; this free and uninhibited creative environment laid the groundwork for his subsequent development of a versatile visual language across materials such as crayon, oil paint, pastel, and three-dimensional painting.
For Tony WONG, 1972 marked a new starting point for broadening his perspectives once again. The forms, lines, and images he brought from Chicago gradually fermented in the Californian air, beginning to flow with the materials and space. Colors began to carry weight in his hands, and thoughts expanded alongside it, as his creative process shifted from collecting and arranging the world to constructing a shared breathing space with it. During this period, he began participating in exhibitions outside the academy and, upon completing his master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, briefly taught at Illinois State University. This slower pacing of his journey allowed him to explore his direction in teaching and creation. Soon after, he chose to move to New York, a city that would later encompass nearly all his creative energy and life.
III. The Process Yet to Arrive: New York
Upon arriving in New York, Tony WONG did not come with a defined style but instead brought with him a keen awareness of form and narrative. His works appeared spontaneous, yet they contained a logic formed through long-term collection, observation, and discernment. The rhythm and chaos of New York offered him the possibility to recombine the fragments scattered throughout his life, while Eastern memories gained fresh nourishment in this place. He placed these fragments within a unifying dimension, categorizing memory while stitching together the emotions connected to it. Thus, he gradually established a creative methodology centered around personal narrative: the figures and images within his work were no longer mere representations of external events but rather a sort of emotional weaving, a mode of construction that grew from within, liberating the artwork from thematic constraints and presenting a continuously evolving creative energy.
In many past discussions, Tony WONG has often been categorized under neo-expressionism, a style also referred to as "bad painting" in America. From the perspective of creative motivation, such a classification is both accurate and misleading. It is accurate in that his paintings indeed exude a strong corporeality, driven by emotion; however, it is misleading in that he does not aim for emotional outpouring but rather uses emotion as a spotlight to illuminate areas yet to be defined. Consequently, the imagery he creates often carries an unfinished openness, as if just emerging from memory, not yet fully encompassed by the language of the era. Viewed from another angle, his works may be closer to a form of psychological analysis through image generation—not narrative-driven visualizations but visuals that invoke narrative. The canvas seems to become a transitional space between consciousness and the subconscious, where brushstrokes transform into modes of thought, and color serves as a vessel for emotion, rendering the creation a process of mutual generation between self and world.
IV. The Removal of Faces: Deconstructing Viewing and Recognition Mechanisms
From Tony WONG's 1980s oil series, the reflection of clothing and skin color reveals a sensitive context of class and racial politics in America at that time. Even as society moved towards ideals of freedom and equality, issues of race remained deeply ingrained within the social structure. In the pieces presented in this exhibition, viewers are often drawn to the focused composition within the imagery. However, further examination of works such as the "He and She" series or oil portrait series like Waiter and Mrs. Jones reveals that we cannot discern the emotions of the characters from their facial features. Instead, we are confronted by the tension released throughout the entire composition. This "absent face" leads viewers away from traditional recognition cues, pushing them directly into the emotional realm conveyed by the body posture. In some earlier series, figures are presented in half-portraits from the neck down to the chest, providing the only identifiable social structural information through clothing and skin color. Tony WONG precisely severs the readability of the face, causing viewers to lose the most intuitive and habitual point of judgment.
In everyday cognition, the face and facial features are our first steps in social categorization. From a psychological perspective, humans only need about a hundred seconds to form initial evaluations about others regarding attractiveness, trustworthiness, or kindness. This rapid judgment mechanism is a capacity we begin to develop in infancy; the "face" becomes the earliest interface for self-identity and the recognition of others. Therefore, this "removal of the face" in the composition is not merely a formal choice but a deconstruction of social identification mechanisms. From Gilles Deleuze's concept of faciality, the face is not natural; it is an abstract tool of control and discipline. Society constructs classifications such as "normal and abnormal," "acceptable and dangerous," "civilized and other" through the face, and Tony WONG 's compositions, in some respects, deconstruct this identification tool: When the face is removed, viewers lose the mechanism for moral or social judgment derived from habitual patterns and are left to confront a body without a face, prompting us to reconsider the meanings we would "naturally" ascribe to others.
Through his composition, Tony WONG guides viewers to this realization: when the face cannot be seen, clothing and skin color instead highlight the messages of power, prejudice, and social stratification. His paintings are not merely formal experiments but challenges to the cognition of viewers, reminding us how faces are produced culturally, managed by power, and ultimately become interfaces for social reading. Besides the deconstruction of portraits, his works continually explore the possibilities of "relationship": the subtle connections between individuals, between the individual and society, and between memory and identity. This theme runs through Tony WONG's lifelong creative journey, making each painting not only a presentation of imagery or a straightforward narrative but also a reflection of the artist's detailed feelings and observations of the world.
V. Still on the Journey: Tony WONG 1970-1980
Looking back on Tony WONG 's creative journey, we see a subject in continuous motion: from everyday observation to collage experiments, then to sensitive mastery over materials, colors, and space—his art consistently explores the relationship between the self and the world. This is an incomplete journey, reflecting both the immigrant experience across cultures and the contemplation of social categorization, identity, and memory; his early works mirror a state of "not yet arrived": existing within a concrete historical reality, yet suspended in the realm of subjective perception and creative experiment. Through the language of neo-expressionism, Tony WONG translates emotions, corporeality, and psychological experiences into the power of the canvas; through the "absent face" and fragmented narratives, he urges viewers to break free from established judgments, facing anew the operations of culture, power, and social structures. Simultaneously, his works present a free exploration across mediums and styles: sketches, collages, oil paints, pastels, and the later developed three-dimensional paintings interact and grow together, forming a unique visual language that integrates memory, emotion, and social observation into his works.
Thus, the exhibition "Tony Wong 1970-1980: The World Connected by Lines" carries the subtitle "The America Yet to Arrive," references not only geography and history but also serves as a metaphor for art and identity. Tony WONG 's creations, like his journey, are always in motion, attempting to piece together his worldview from the fragments of the world and his own memories. This world belongs not only to the artist personally but also invites every viewer to reconsider the interplay of culture, identity, and self, in the yet-to-arrive shores, where we witness art continuously growing and the self in constant evolution.
