Wong has invented a few different terms to describe his work. He drops words like “postinteresting” and “readydesigneds” every once in a while when discussing his pieces, but the main one he likes to use is “paraconceptual.” Against the pretensions of high conceptual art, Wong started making work that clearly had a double purpose. He created pieces that could be considered art or just as easily be marketed as straight-up consumer goods. His Starck lamp is a good example: “It’s very conceptual, but at the end of the day, most of the viewers just say ‘Wow, that’s a beautiful lamp.’ ”

The piece was intended not only as a tribute to Marcel Duchamp, who famously called a urinal Fountain and deemed it a work of art, but also as a proposal to reset the clock on conceptualism. “I thought if I could start at the beginning of conceptual art and turn a chair into a lamp by saying ‘this is a lamp,’ then we could start the dialogue all over again,” says Wong. The piece is also one of his readydesigneds — a design object he has reinterpreted for his own purposes, and an idea obviously borrowed from Duchamp’s readymades.

But where Duchamp’s readymades were often crude, seemingly thrown down in galleries with reckless abandon, Wong teases people with carefully crafted beauty. His pieces typically have a flawless finish, like the luxury goods they question. You could be excused for lusting after his take on Commedes Garçons perfume, for which he marinated diamonds, or for Graffiti Bottle, for which he covered the back of another perfume vessel with an even, black-matte surface into which people could carve personalized messages.

It is for this reason, and the fact that some of his objects end up being commercially produced, that critics are sometimes unsure where to place his work. Is it art or is it design? His wares are sold at retail stores, he consciously stays out of most galleries, and he usually participates in design fairs instead of art fairs. “If you want a piece to work, it has to be within its context,” says Wong. “A lot of the pieces I make that look like design objects need to be out in the retail market where they belong and not brought into a white gallery and put up on a pedestal.”

Wong was briefly obsessed with thePrada flagship store in New York’s SoHo, which suffered severe smoke and water damage from a fire in January. Opened in 2001, the store was designed by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas and constructed at a cost of$40 million (US). The interior featured a giant wooden wave that looked something like a skateboard half-pipe, an expansive wall covered with dramatic designer wallpaper that was changed periodically, and spackling over nail holes that was purposely left unfinished. Wong already had a history with the place?—?just before the original opening, Prada had hired him to walk through and provide a second opinion on the finishing touches. But after the whole place went up in smoke, he developed a new proposal: leave everything as it is and seal the damage under a glossy clear coat. More than just wishful thinking, Wong floated the idea past the editor of Art Review magazine, who tried to sell the proposal to Koolhaas. Not surprisingly, the architect wasn’t co-operative. The store reopened in March, with new fixtures, floors, and wallpaper.

Wong may be getting more ambitious with the scale of his projects, but that doesn’t mean that he’ll be paying any less attention to the little things. There’s one photo in his portfolio that’s particularly telling?—?it shows a honeymooning couple snuggling together on the banks of a lake, posing for a touching portrait. It’s the kind of shot they might have hung on their living-room wall. But there, in the background, is Wong, flexing his biceps and looking tough. He has labelled the shot self portrait. Can such a prank really be considered art? “That ties into my work,” he says. “Stealing other people’s things.”•