Kacey Wong

Kacey Wong, born Wong Kwok-choi, is an award-winning Chinese interdisciplinary artist whose experimental art investigates the relationship between man and environment, questioning the social and political norms within these spaces. Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1970, but has pursued his arts education internationally, studying Architecture at Cornell University, earning a master’s degree in Sculpture from Chelsea College of the Arts, and most recently receiving his Doctor of Fine Arts from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Wong has been making art for over twenty years, but was largely inspired to actively participate in public protest after Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011. Since then, Wong has been active in the street art community and has used art to draw attention to Hong Kong’s political unrest. In 2013, he began a mock design competition for the logo of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, bringing attention to protest art in Hong Kong through social media.

Since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, Chinese Communist crackdowns have slowly eroded any sense of democracy in Hong Kong. Seeking to quash a wave of historic protests against a bill that would have allowed citizens from Hong Kong to be extradited to China, Hong Kong’s government slammed a draconian national security law through their legislature in July 2020, giving Chinese authorities extensive new power to curb dissent and criminalize free speech. The law criminalized “secession, subversion, organization and perpetration of terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.” These broad, vaguely defined categories have allowed authorities to abuse their power and crack down on dissidents across the island, leading to the arrests of countless protestors, activists, and cultural figures who had been publicly critical of Chinese influence in Hong Kong. As threats to democracy in Hong Kong have risen, and the stakes of making political art are higher than ever, Kacey Wong has not backed down.

“I wanted to join the resistance some way, but I couldn’t find them. So, I became the resistance.”
— Kacey Wong at TED Talk Vienna

Kacey Wong is not only a respected artist and activist, but also a teacher. Wong was invited by TED Talk Vienna in 2019 to talk about his protest art work and share his Five Points of Protest Art theory, protest strategies, and stories from the front line of using art as protest. To Wong, protest art is more than just a tool to communicate and make change. It is a lens through which one can investigate the self and the constantly shifting world around us.

• Punish your enemy, not yourself
• It has to be light…punish yourself not your enemy…you must be able to carry it;
• It must be easy to understand, it’s not a museum or gallery space…if the public don’t get it they won’t look at it;
• It must be artistic. Craftsmanship, colour, form, conceptual?;
• You have to release it fast because political awareness changes faster.. Andy Warhol stated a 15 minutes of fame, now it’s 15 seconds. Timing is important too. You don’t want it to be yesterday’s news. At the right time, it becomes the prophecy of the future.