Magdalen Wong’s work focuses on discovering alternative uses for everyday objects, often interpreting their shape and packaging as “scores” or codes for potential actions. Her work is playful, sometimes feminine, and often political. Wong works with sculpture, video, installation and photography, with context-specific performances sometimes reappearing as video works.
In Happily Ever After (2008), the letters found on the numeric keypad of a Greek ATM offer an opportunity to spell out the message "and they lived good but we live better." In other video works like Ring (2008), Portal (2009), and Lite (2010), Wong treats inexpensive objects like glow-rings and balloons as instigators of mechanical yet strangely suggestive acts, like the smashing of Christmas lights with a pair of shiny high-heeled shoes.
Magdalen Wong received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, and currently lives and works in Hong Kong. She has performed and exhibited in the United States, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, and Sweden, and in recent years completed residencies in Vermont, USA, and Eretria, Greece.