Mary Sui Yee Wong is a Montréal-based multidisciplinary artist who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1963. Wong’s work draws inspiration from personal memory, cultural herstory, and familial legacy to explore a hybrid ‘self’ as social construct. Wong is fascinated with how postcolonial Orientalism is marketed, disseminated, and consumed within a global economy. Presently, Wong is exploring alternative narratives to shed light on the disquiet of anti-Asian/anti-Chinese sentiment driven by racial neoliberalism. Working across disciplines that include sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Wong endeavors to defy fixedness in art as an act of resistance.
Wong has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Most notably, in 2021, Wong presented a second iteration of an earlier work titled Sing Juk Sing in the exhibition Whose Chinatown Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections, curated by Karen Tam at Griffin Projects, North Vancouver. In 2012, her original line of faux fashion Yellow Apparel was presented in Fashionality: Dress and Identity in Contemporary Canadian Art at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and in 2010, a series of banners titled Ja Na Da Ren, was installed in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.
Wong has been an active member of the artist centers and community organizations as board member of Oboro Gallery (2011-2013) and Optica Gallery (1998-2003). She was past president of Little Pear Garden Collective, a Chinese performance group in Toronto (2004-2011). Wong is an honorary member of Yuet Sing Music Association in Montreal since 1990 and maintains a deep connection with the Chinese community as advocate and mentor.
Wong completed her Master of Fine Arts in 2003 at Concordia University where she has been teaching in the Studio Arts department for the past two decades. She was also an affiliate faculty and co-founder of the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Socially Engaged Arts program at Goddard College, Vermont, USA.
