Through his artwork, Will Kwan casts a critical eye at the contradictions and inequities of the globalized world, and especially what he calls the "myths of a synchronized, equitable, impartial, frictionless and sanitized world economy."
A lecturer in studio art at UTSC, Kwan is also a product of that globalized world—a Hong Kong–born Canadian who completed his bachelor’s degree at UTSC and his master’s degree in fine art at Columbia University in New York City. Kwan has been an artist-in-residence at institutes and museums in Ireland, the Netherlands and China. This past summer he taught and exhibited in Hong Kong, and this fall his work will be showcased at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany.
"He looks very sharply at the contemporary world," says Barbara Fischer, who curated Kwan’s first solo exhibition in 2009 at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto. "With all [his] particular and well-researched interests, his works are also often stunningly beautiful."