Adrian Wong is a Vancouver-born artist and recent graduate of the Combined Degree BA + BFA program at Tufts University. Born to Cantonese parents and raised in Hong Kong, his image-based practice explores visible and invisible infrastructures, from networks that enable visibility to those that evade detection or operate unnoticed.

In his series Carton, Wong uses the egg as a lens through which to examine systems of optimization and standardization. “I am thinking a lot about optimization and infrastructure, and the egg is in many ways a perfect metaphor for contemporary notions of perfection,” he explains. “Consider the ways in which chickens are cultivated in sterile environments—eggs are sorted so that only perfectly oval ones make it into the carton. Inversely, the infrastructure of the carton itself has to be quite physically precise so that eggs do not break under the stress of transportation. So in this sense, I am thinking about the ways of ‘housing’ fragility.”

As the project developed, Wong arrived at a more personal connection. “I had completely overlooked the fact that perhaps these themes arose out of my own origins as a child of in vitro fertilization, similarly a process of optimization, precision, and risk—therein lies something strangely sublime about the end product.”