Digital artist Paul Wong unabashedly uses his phone as his studio
'We're in the primordial period of digital culture. The shift from analog is fairly revolutionary'
"I do everything with my phone. This is my studio."
With a career spanning four decades, Vancouver interdisciplinary artist Paul Wong has been on the leading edge of bringing technology into his art practice and he's unabashed about his embrace of the new. "I proudly and loudly say [my phone] is where I do most of my work."
Even though we've now been in this digital world for a while, Wong feels that we're still relatively speaking just on the edge of this new way of existing and making art. "We're in the primordial period of digital culture," he says. "The shift from archaic analog in the last ten years is fairly revolutionary."
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"I think it's still very much an experimental phase of how we can see the world, feel the world, create in that world and share in that world."
Wong doesn't just celebrate the technology for itself, however. It's about what's made or done with it. "There's always going to be new technology. Picking up a piece of technology and learning how to use it doesn't make you an artist. It's doing what art should do, which is taking it to another kind of place."
Check out more of Paul Wong's work below:
Art Minute is a CBC Arts series taking you inside the minds of Canadian artists to hear what makes them tick and the ideas behind their work.