Rising Stars: Meet Bryan Wong

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Wong.

Hi Bryan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m an artist based out of Burbank who’s been working in animation for the last six years. In my free time, I do gallery work and write/illustrate a graphic novel called Simulacra, which is about a mysterious urban legend in a remote Southwestern town in the late 70s. I burn through podcasts and documentaries about cults at an alarming rate, and I’m increasingly worried that there’s a cult out there with the perfect pitch for me. Lately, I spend a lot of time thinking about how awkward everyone’s going to be at parties once the pandemic’s finally over. I have this really clear premonition of myself months from now at a friend’s house party, unable to stop myself from bringing the conversation to the fact that all amphibians may be extinct within our lifetime due to pollution, deforestation and climate change. “How are we going to explain to our future grandchildren that Kermit the Frog was based on a type of animal that used to exist?”, I’ll ask, ruining the vibe permanently.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
My dad passed away from a freak heart attack in 2014. There’d been no warning, he’d been in good health his entire life, it was his first heart attack. He was 62, which was about the age that his father had died in the same way. Mixed in with the grief and the shock and the anger and the numbness was the realization that my own life might be cut decades shorter than I’d expected. I’d thought of making art as a sort of substitute immortality, something to speak for me after I was gone. Faced with the empty, all-encompassing indifference of real death, my resolve crumbled away to nothing. I spent the next two years held in a stasis between grief and fury. There are long stretches of time I don’t remember. I went through a phase where I’d go out running every night until I’d pass out, just so the external pain would get into the same ballpark as the internal pain. Then I’d spend a week in bed, binge-watching a show I didn’t care about and remember none of it. I’d make these grand plans to turn my life around with a renewed sense of purpose and abandon them almost immediately for another week of insomniac binge-watching. I started to distance myself from people because I was terrified I’d snap at them.

After a while, my ability to make art at all started to fall apart. I still think about where I’d be right now if I hadn’t gotten that job with Titmouse Inc. in 2016. It had been a while since I’d been around other people and I was terrified that I’d gone fully feral, I had this vision that someone would say something perfectly innocuous that I’d take the wrong way and I’d bite their head off. It didn’t happen though. I did the job, made some new friends, and the studio kept calling me back to do new shows. I’ve been working for them off and on ever since. I really fought against the idea of learning any sort of moral from the worst thing that ever happened to me. When someone you love dies, it’s not a moment for a lesson in your story, it’s the end of theirs. I still believe that. There’s no guarantee I would’ve come back from the place I was in if it wasn’t for a couple of good friends and a lot of dumb luck, it had very little to do with me overcoming my demons. That being said, if you’re dealing with the loss of a loved one right now, I guess my advice would be to let yourself feel what you’re feeling without judgment and to let it take as long as it takes.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I work in animation as a background painter, so most of the parts of animation that don’t actually animate. On the side, I do gallery work and I’m working on a graphic novel called SIMULACRA. If I had to say I had a visual trademark, it would have to be a combination of punchy, graphic shape design and moody, atmospheric color palettes. As someone trying to keep a foot in both animation and illustration, I feel like my style is constantly trying to reconcile both filmic and illustrative influences. A lot of my illustrative work draws heavily on the art of midcentury, graphically inclined artists like Charley Harper, Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle, all of whom bridged the divide between illustration and animation at points in their careers. They each worked with an incredible efficiency of shape and color, without ever reducing the subjects they portrayed to academic studies in minimalism, that’s a visual tightrope act that never stops being impressive to me. My graphic novel’s been leaning in a more filmic direction, using atmospheric approaches to light and shadow to give my shape driven visual style a little more of a dreamy, foreboding feel.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
To me, the most important thing to try to bring into any situation is an awareness of just how much my successes and struggles have had to do with chance. Chance is random and amoral. It was chance that I was born into a family willing and able to support a kid who wanted to go into the arts, which is something that can cost an enormous amount of time, money and emotional toil. It was chance that I may have inherited genes that are gonna make my life decades shorter than I’d like. It was chance that I happened to be working in a field that’s been relatively unaffected by the pandemic. It was chance that I was born into an era of nonstop economic catastrophes and manmade ecological disasters, which was also an era in which I was able to pursue opportunities that would’ve been closed off to any previous generation of my family due to racism. This isn’t to say I’m content to throw my hands up, lay facedown in a river and let the stream carry me wherever it wants, so much as it is a reminder to keep my successes and failures in perspective. I’ve had chances that the vast majority of people didn’t, I’ve had second chances when a lot of people didn’t get first ones.

On balance, I’ve been lucky, and the fact that I made the most of that luck doesn’t erase that fact or the fact that there are plenty of people working just as hard who aren’t gonna get the same breaks. There’s a powerful impulse in our society to impose a language of morality on outcomes that are largely governed by chance, to say that if you’re succeeding it’s because you’re in the right and that if you’re struggling it’s because you’re in the wrong. It breeds a callousness to the suffering of others in order to reassure the comfortable that it could never happen to them because they’re good, hard-working people. I don’t think you could get to the point we’re at now, with hundreds of thousands of people dying from a disease that plenty of much poorer and less powerful countries have gotten largely under control, without this sort of contempt for people who are suffering. I think one of the values of art is the ability to push back on this sort of callousness, to create a space where the narratives of the marginalized are valued and where their humanity is recognized.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://simulacra.squarespace.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryan_wong_illustration/?hl=en
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NoTheOtherBryan

Image Credits
My personal photo was taken by Emily Waters, you can find her work here: https://www.instagram.com/emilywatersphoto/?hl=en