Adrian Wong’s installations, videos, and sculptures draw from varied subjects and explore the intricacies of his relationship to his environment (experientially, historically, culturally, and through the filter of fantastical or fictionalized narratives). These organic and open-ended artifacts of his process often involve a collaborative engagement with subjects.

As a graduate student in psychology at Stanford, Wong studied non-linguistic and extra-linguistic cognition, an interest that persisted into his sculptural investigations at Yale where his ideas developed visually and formally. In his broad-ranging practice, this interest led him to adopt this deeply collaborative approach – dependent upon language yet gravitating towards spaces where communication pushes the limits of the speech act. This has manifested in his work with among others, a years-long engagement with telepathic animal communicators.

Adrian Wong’s collaborative art-making practice examines authorship by exploring the depths of the mind’s eye through the lives of animals current and past. Through the act of collaboration, the artist is inextricably connected to both the process and the object. The conceptual nature of this process allows for a myriad of creative possibilities with each party contributing a dynamic function. The product, or visual record of the process, represents a totemic object wrapped in the energies contributed by all.

Wong was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois in 1980. Originally trained in psychology (MA Stanford, 2003), he began making and exhibiting work in San Francisco while concurrently performing research in developmental linguistics. He continued his post-graduate studies in sculpture (MFA Yale, 2005). Wong relocated his studio to Hong Kong in 2005, but recently returned to Chicago, where he currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at 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), and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam)-and can be found in public and private collections worldwide, including the 21C Collection (Chicago), DSL Foundation Collection (Paris), K11 Art Foundation (Shanghai), Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Sifang Museum (Nanjing), and the Uli Sigg Collection (Lucerne).