Holy Hoax

Sex, lies and videotape with installation artist Virgil Wong.

by Jakob Dorof

Virgil Wong is a tough nut to crack. In speaking to him about his video installation "Billions of Robots Heal the Human Heart," it's hard to tell where his true intentions lie.

The press kit literature for the event promises to document the story of Philip Brouette, a "hockey player who was stabbed through the heart by a jealous ex-lover," and was revived by an innovative procedure called "cardionanoroboplasty," wherein microscopic robots use cutting-edge chemistry to re-fuse the torn tendons of the heart from within the body at the Dwayne Medical Center at RYT Hospital. There will be a video detailing Brouette's soap operatic tale of Internet espionage and broken-hearted betrayal and images detailing his groundbreaking operation. But it's all a lie. 

In addition to Brouette's "story," there will be videos of past miracles from the Dwayne Medical Center, including one of the most infamous medical hoaxes of the past decade — one of Wong's own making.

"That was the male pregnancy project," Wong recalls with a fond grin. He claims he didn't think it would be taken seriously — it was just another of the couple dozen "scenario mapping" installations he's directed in half as many years, which examine a (largely fabricated) intersection between art, science and technology.

Scenario mapping, he explains, is "an extrapolation based on current medicine and research, to imagine where science might take us in 20 or 30 years. It's different from futurism because it's based on pre-existing research, and lets you map out possibilities in a practical way." In a sense, then, Wong's projects can be interpreted as well-intentioned insights into how females might someday not be the human race's sole childbearing sex, or how nanotechnology could potentially save lives with barely a lift of a real doctor's finger.

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Which would be easier to believe if Wong didn't make so much effort to stir up trouble himself. With the "First Human Male Pregnancy" project, for example, he established a convincing site for the fake RYT Hospital, and would reply to media inquiries as "different people within this fictitious hospital, from different e-mails we had set up." He would then link to the bogus articles that resulted on the project's Web site — malepregnancy.com — further perpetuating and validating the lie — a fire he also helped stoke by tossing in some gonzo publicity of his own, including an adept Photoshop job for a non-existent U.S. News & World Report cover story on the pregnant Mr. Mingwei Lee.

Then there's the matter of Phineas Liu, the bespectacled, Ph.D.-slinging alter ego Wong has adopted to give straight-faced PowerPoint rebuttals to the findings presented in Wong's videos. These events usually take place in malls and museums, but for this exhibition, Wong says the presentation will take place at International House on Feb. 14 — Valentine's Day.

If Wong's name is as familiar to hoax debunkers as it is to the arts community, could merry pranksterism still be the motivation here? A glimpse at the young man's portfolio reveals deft hands in the fine arts as much as in multimedia. Photo sets boast powerful, evocative documents of everything from Bush protests to Las Vegas, and his pen-and-ink portraits of NYC subway commuters reflect the skills he picked up studying Renaissance painting techniques in Europe. Tellingly, Wong sees these all as part of the same vision.

"It's all connected," he says. "Just one big experiment of looking at and communicating with the world."

Billions of Robots Heal the Human Heart | Opens Wed., Jan. 21, 6-8 p.m.; through March 6, International House Video Lounge, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org