The future of activism: A Q&A with renowned Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong

Benjamin Von Wong is a renowned Canadian artist and activist known for his environmental art installations and hyper-realist style. Originally a mining engineer with a degree from McGill University, Von Wong transitioned to the arts in 2012. His work often incorporates recycled and reclaimed materials to address critical global issues such as climate change and social justice. Von Wong’s innovative projects, including viral social media campaigns and large-scale installations like “Strawpocalypse,” have garnered international acclaim and inspired action towards environmental sustainability.

Vinod Rajasekaran: You are a world-renowned artist and activist. You say the mission of your work is to make a positive impact unforgettable. I’ve seen your installations and illustrations. They really are unforgettable. They’re imaginative, compelling, jarring, and eye-opening. And the engineer in me loves them because the material innovation is brilliant and mechanically they’re designed beautifully. So give us some insight into your journey, your story, and perhaps also your inspirations and your dreams.

Ben Wong: All right. How to do that quickly. So, I am actually originally Canadian, and I was… So, yeah, I was. I’m originally Canadian and currently living in the United States. My work began as a hard rock mining engineer. I studied at McGill University, and when I was younger, I never had a bone of activism necessarily in me. I just started off thinking that university is what you did after high school and just was on that treadmill of getting an education, getting a job, and seeing where I would end up.

And somehow in that journey, I picked up photography as a hobby. To my great surprise, photography was one of those hobbies that actually stuck. I think it’s because I found community. I was at the right place at the right time. It was a skill set that requires the support of technology in order to execute. So it’s not like a paintbrush; you just need to learn how to use that paintbrush. And I think that sort of collaborative, pro-social nature of photography, where you’re constantly working with other people to photograph them, was what really drew me to that art form.

Fast forward to working as a hard rock mining engineer for three and a half years, doing photography in the evenings and on weekends. I eventually woke up one morning and thought, okay, I don’t know what I want to do in life, but I know exactly what I don’t want to do. And that’s work at a bigger desk in ten years, earning a little bit more money, doing somewhat of the same thing. So I ended up quitting that day job and just seeing what art could offer. But I think in my mind, when I took this sabbatical initially, it was really meant to be a sabbatical. It wasn’t a career path pivot. Somehow, ten years into the future now, that sabbatical turned into a full-fledged career.

My brush with activism started a little bit later, maybe two and a half or three years after quitting my day job. I had created a number of photography campaigns that had gone viral, from tagging models underwater in a shipwreck in Bali while I was on vacation. At the time, I think this was right at the generation of clickbait where headlines were really popular, and YouTube videos were just starting to get mainstream recognition.

I rode that wave by doing a series of different stunts that got me on the front of different newspapers, which eventually grew and culminated into a commercial photography career. But I think very quickly, as I was starting to earn larger sums of money from corporate campaigns, I started to realize that this was not actually something that motivated me. It felt kind of empty.

Thus began the journey to figure out how to combine fantasy and impact together. How do you create stories that can help move narratives forward?

Sometime in 2016, I took another sabbatical. But this time, I was like, all right, we’re not going to take any commercial work. We’re just going to focus on impact. I didn’t really know what impact was, so I had to dive into that world, watch a bunch of documentaries, and try to find people that wanted to collaborate with me, especially because I was coming at it from a completely different angle.