McMichael Canadian Art Collection > Fashionality - Dress and Identity in Contemporary Canadian Art

Mary Sui Yee Wong

Mary Sui Yee Wong (b. 1956) is Montreal based artist whose multidisciplinary work involves performance, sculpture, installation, video, technology, text, and sound. She received both her BFA and MFA from Concordia University, and now teaches in their Studio Arts Department. Wong actively exhibits in and outside Canada, and she also holds an adjunct position at Goddard College, Vermont, USA, both in the Individualized Studies program and the MFA Interdisciplinary Arts program. She is also a board member of Oboro Gallery and the Montreal Yuet Sing Music Association.

Within this climate of flux, there is a resurgence of a kind of fashionable Orientalism that concerns me. Take, for example, the recent trends: the use of Asian calligraphy and symbols in clothing, the popularization of feng shui in architecture, Hollywood’s attempt to cash in on kung fu movies, and the flooding of contemporary Asian art in the international art market. This resurgence concerns me and has brought me to revisit my passion for fabrics and surface designs, as it relates to representation and cultural consumption.

Yellow Apparel employs the convenient vehicles of fashion and fashion photography, combined with the look of the sixties, to re-appropriate the appropriated and play with notions of acculturation as part of the everyday.

Mary Sui Yee Wong