1:1 Artists Select: Paul Wong | Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun
July 15–August 24, 2025
The impulse to make connections between objects is a nearly universal experience. Artists are always in dialogue with their predecessors and peers, and they often make astute curators.
1:1 Artists Select is a new initiative that invites artists to select a work from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s extensive collection to be displayed in dialogue with their own work in the Forecourt.
The seventh and final to participate is Vancouver–based artist Paul Wong. He has selected a work from the collection by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Paul Wong (Prince Rupert, BC) is an influential video and media artist who became known in the 1970s for his visceral works that questioned the social and political constructions of identity, race and sexuality. Wong’s art is rooted in community and reflects over five decades of organizing and advocacy in Vancouver, including his role in establishing Satellite Video Exchange Society (now VIVO Media Arts Centre) in 1973 and On The Cutting Edge Productions Society (now On Main Gallery) in 1986. Wong is an award-winning artist, activist and curator whose work has been presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery since 1978, including a mid-career retrospective in 2002. His work entered the Gallery’s collection in 2000.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun (Kamloops, BC) is a renowned artist of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num, Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) descent and a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. Throughout his over forty-year career as an artist, Yuxweluptun has responded to social and political issues such as Indigenous sovereignty, the impacts of colonization and environmental destruction. In many of his paintings, the landscape emerges from elements of Northwest Coast formline, incorporating Coast Salish design and cosmology to mark the land as ancestral territory. His work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and first entered the Gallery’s collection in 1991.
