RIP: TOBIAS WONG

Tobias Wong, a New York-based artist and designer, was found dead in his apartment over the weekend. This is a loss: at 35, he had already produced a body of work rich with nose-thumbing cleverness. As Alexandra Marshall writes over at the New York Times's T-Magazine blog:

Wong was a soft-spoken and gentle presence, but his satirical, cheeky work contained an undercurrent of violence. Bullet Proof Rose, featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s 2005 exhibition “SAFE: Design Takes on Risk,” is a flower-shaped brooch made of Kevlar. His “Aalto Door Stop” is a cement block cast from one of Alvar Aalto’s Savoy vases; its construction process requires the shattering of the vase to extract the piece inside. For another diamond project (Wong loved to subvert their conventional glamour), he set brilliant-cut, solitaire stones backwards into pronged engagement ring-style settings to form glittering, dangerous spikes.

He was also playful and ready with punchlines, as with one of our favourite designs, smoking mittens:

Design is often considered a red-headed stepchild in the art world: commercial, functional, mass-produced (ideally) and a means to an end. Wong made for an interesting ambassador: “I don’t draft or create models/prototypes, I don’t problem solve and I definitely don’t make things to make life easier,” he told Theme, a design magazine, in 2008 (an interview cited in the NYT obituary). What a shame he is no longer around to confound expectations.

~ EB