Wong Kit Yi: North Pole Futures

About

For the duration of the show, Ali Wong, investment manager for Wong Kit Yi, offers intrepid collectors a chance to commission a custom-made work, which will be created by the artist this fall on a sailing expedition to the North Pole.

Prospective patrons may choose three elements out of Wong’s lists: a date, a color, and a weird word. These three terms will be combined together in a photographic, sculptural, performative, or painterly manner in the Arctic. The price of each work is generated by a complex calculation that factors together weather conditions, sun cover, moon illumination, and randomized variables; this determines both the artwork price and a percentage of the sale that will be donated to a nonprofit organization of the artist’s choosing. Patrons thus become co-producers, fellow adventurers, speculative investors, and inadvertent philanthropists all at once.

The exhibition features texts, objects, and time-based works. Video interviews with select experts — including an art dealer, a commodities trader, a pawnbroker, and a fishmonger — consider the nature and techniques of valuation and pricing. The exhibition also includes a publication and website wongfutures.com for contracting the artworks.

There are only a limited number of contracts for sale, so don’t wait to invest in the future now.

Wong Kit Yi is an artist based in Hong Kong and New York. Recent projects have appeared in the exhibitions Regarding Lightness: On Life’s Way, Oil Street Art Space, Hong Kong (2015); Bringing the World into the World, Queens Museum, NY (2014); The Ceiling Should Be Green, P!, NY (2013); and EXCHANGE, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD (2013). Wong’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, ChinaDaily, Asian Art News, Time Out Hong Kong, and South China Morning Post. She holds an MFA from Yale University.