Mel Wong
Locked Out
Photography
2021
Mel Wong has an interdisciplinary practice encompassing photography, video, performance, sound and text. She graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has research and curatorial interests in Visual Culture.
She has written about, exhibited in and curated exhibitions around themes of identity, liminality, women’s work, labour, economies, cultural heritage and migration. Her work has included producing broadcast audio for Radio Cycle, East London ( 2003), producing sound, text and image work with Creative FM Radio, Kirklees (2004), Co – Curating multimedia exhibition Urban Anthropology, Leeds City Museum (2012), producer of Alt at Brunton Theatre Venue 191, Edinburgh (2013) and producing content as part of her Flash Transmissions series (Online 2019, London Culture Mile Festival, 2020).
Up to Covid she worked on varied arts engagement projects at BBC, Kirklees LA, Proper Job Theatre Co, Tate Britain and Kirklees LA.
Mel Wong is initiator, founder and coordinator of artist-led research and workshop hub Guava Collective.
The project builds on her work as an educator and community builder. Workshop topics include the practicalities of staging pop up events and interventions, creative modes of assessment via image capture, audio, theatre techniques and the documentation of site specific flash events using partner space sharing online and offline.
Wong has produced programmes for Creative FM, BBC Radio and is a contributor to the book ‘Tangled Roots: True Life Stories about Mixed Race Britain’ (2015).
Since 2020 Wong has been developing for touring work around issues of migration, power, economies, services and access: Melangion Monologues. This photographic, video and performative work centres around a fictional character encompassing a melange of identities. The
the mixed heritage unpaid carer – often feeling displaced, disembodied – draws upon personal stories and highlights the role of creative agency in countering adversity.
