Miss Chinatown juxtaposes the views of eight subjects against the background image of a beauty pageant: the Miss Chinese-Vancouver 1996. The subjects are all full or part ethnic Chinese, together they represent a diverse face of the Chinese-Canadian community, they present different perspectives on identity, home, sex and race. The contestants are seen going through the paces in the cheong-san (traditional side slit dress) segment of the live television spectacle.

Wong's first colour videotape bears the influence of several artistic genres popular in the 1970s, including performance and body art. We see Kenneth Fletcher draw several millilitres of blood from his arm and inject the contents of the syringe into Paul Wong's back, just under the skin. The camera closes in on this, observing the slow response of the immune system as the skin turns red and purple. What was originally intended as a sort of ritual uniting the young men as blood brothers, with implicit reference to drug use, has become a disturbing and dangerous act, when AIDS evokes our deepest fears and anxieties.

Refugee Class of 2000 is a series of three TV ads produced as part of the Unite Against Racism campaign mounted by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. These ads started airing nationally on Jan. 15, 2000. The central subjects are thirty four Grade 12 students from the graduating class of 2000 of Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School. Tupper is in a working class culturally diverse neighbourhood in Vancouver. Many of the students are first generation born Canadians. Grad students were chosen as the demographic group, they straddle two centuries, the violent racist past and representing the hopes and dreams of a better future in the new multicultural world.

A skillful, sensual rendering of an intriguing performance orchestrated by the artist. Through a fog-laden atmosphere, iconic figures emerge to perform on a huge turntable. Our look at this garishly lit spectacle is mediated by the gaze of a female Red Guard. All flesh and brilliance, this tape appears to critique popular culture by robbing it of any ostensible content. Hollywood proverb says, beneath the surface of fake tinsel lies only the real tinsel – the detritus of our times.

A visual/aural non-linear narrative. A layering of ideas, facts, opinions, prejudices, fears, and styles. The story is based upon the innuendoes and interrelationships of four main characters – Gary, Gina, Jeanette and Paul. Distinct video forms are used to build the narrative and to handle the complex range of information and technical styles. The video’s intent is to develop a broader understanding and tolerance by its viewers towards a new sexual attitude.

"For those who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, glamour received its highest expression in fashion magazines like Vogue, where the representation of lives and those who lived them achieved perfection on every page. Prime Cuts is a work premised on the notion that the lives of magazine models are real (much like another Vancouver artist, Ken Lum, who as a child believed that the bedroom suites in the furniture store flyers that landed on his doorstep were real bedrooms). In exploring the lives of models (some of whom the Mainstreeters worked with through commercial projects), Prime Cuts does not so much imagine what these models get up to both before and after the lights, camera and action of the photo shoot casts them in amber, but extends the fantasy." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982, Satellite Gallery, 2015

The installation Confused: Sexual Views was part of a three-phase project that also included Confused [the videotape] and Confused [the performance]. It was produced just before AIDS had reached epidemic proportions. Twenty-seven individuals face the camera head-on as they speak about bisexuality, especially its more complex and engaging aspects, such as the relationship between sexuality, love, and friendship. Without mincing words, they challenge the conventions of behaviour and human relations conveyed by commercial film and television, and refute the myths surrounding the notion of romantic love. The intent here is to question the constrictive mores that sanction only one style of love, and to examine the many forms of desire and sexuality experienced in our culture, approaching them from a variety of perspectives.

The images seem to suggest a traditional Chinese funeral ceremony associated with ancestor worship, though Wong has remarked they do not represent any particular ritual. The work deals with death, remembrance, and history, and was conceived as a memorial to the Chinese workers who died building the Canadian railway through the Rocky Mountains. It is also dedicated to the artist’s father, Hoy Ming Wong, and to two friends and collaborators who committed suicide, Ken Fletcher (1954-1978) and Paul Speed (1967-1991). Wong created the work while artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. Chinaman’s Peak is the name of a mountain near Banff where, according to legend, a Chinese worker killed himself. The work was first performed at Tunnel Mountain, Banff in 1992, before being exhibited as an installation at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, for the Chinese New Year, in 1993.

This was a site-specific work for spectra-board urban screen located at BC Place stadium in Vancouver. This Day Without Art project, curated by Scott Watson, was launched on Dec. 1, 1993 as part of AIDS Awareness Day. I Love You appeared in four languages: English, French, Chinese, and Coast-Salish. The two spectra-boards on the exterior of the stadium is visible to commuters on two bridges and surrounding streets and buildings in downtown Vancouver.

Wong uses his second generation Chinese-Canadian perspective to frame the Chinese here in the new world, Canada, and in the motherland, China. This is an intimate, personal view. Through his own “family network” and several trips to the People’s Republic of China, the artist gained access to the everyday, non-exotic world of the Chinese. A picture emerges of displaced cultures and traditions in transitions.