Wing Shan WONG, Ms

Pat WingShan Wong (aka Flyingpig) is a community-based illustrator, educator and facilitator. She was a lecturer in (BA)Illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art(2021), guest lecturing at the Royal College of Art(2021), and recently graduated from the Royal College of Art MA in Illustration(2019-2021). Her practice lies in the intersections of architecture, technology, memory and identity that portray community stories ranging from people to landscapes and objects from my surroundings.

Her recent research projects highlight evocative meditations on urban development and its public and personal significance. Barter Archive (2019- ongoing, www.barter-archive.com), it is a community-led project in collaborating with the fishmongers at the Billingsgate Fish Market at Canary Wharf, London. The archive engages with the idea of barter physically and symbolically. It includes memorable objects ‘bartered’ by using her observational drawings of the happenings in the space, as well as videos that document stories and memories of the people. It preserves the collective memory of the Billingsgate community and challenges the domination of capitalism, highlighting and questioning the ways value is assigned through culture and society.

The project won the Varley Memorable Award in 2020 and received a project grant from Art Council England (2021) and Hong Kong Art Development Council(2021). The project is still ongoing with connection to the Museum of London, Migration Museum(UK), Royal College of Art, Camberwell University of Arts, and curators from the Tate Archive and the Whitechapel Gallery. And it is now collected by the Museum of London, where I worked as a researcher(2022). Barter Archive has widely press coverage, including The Guardian, The World of Interiors, It's Nice That and The Londonist, SCMP(HK), etc.

visual communication, socially engaged practice, visual ethnography, anthropology, archival studies