Sculpture, Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation is the second collaboration between Tobias Wong and artist Amelia Bauer. This piece celebrates and plays into the popularity of hanging sun catchers in front of windows in the early 2000’s in Vancouver, while also gently criticising the commodification of New Age spirituality and the adjoining “Self-Help” movement.





The version at the Cooper Hewitt has an 8 foot chain with 60 mm cut Swarovski crystals held by jeweller’s wire reinforced with clear fishing wire. This crystal chain is meant to be hung from a ceiling to hover only a few inches above a table. Each crystal multiplies and refracts the natural light it receives, producing a dazzling effect through hundreds of rainbow-coloured spots of light. Combined with the calmness with which it gently sways, as well as its vertical repetition of crystals, this piece gives an impression of infinity, as if it extended into the sky. Its design and materials facilitate contemplation, creating and a peaceful and almost hypnotic moment in which the viewer is invited to disconnect from their reality and instead get lost in a transcendental meditation.





However, the context in which Transcendental Meditation was made indicates a sense of playful criticism. Tobias Wong and Amelia Bauer were approached to make Transcendental Meditation while they were working on Iceberg Chandelier, the installation they made for Swarovski and placed in the Paris Theatre's lobby at the 2005 Art Basel Miami Beach fair. Iceberg Chandelier consisted of a chandelier with jagged Swarovski crystals hanging in an aquarium filled with piranhas and $12000 worth of jet crystal ‘gravel’. Having a precious and exquisite object surrounded by a swarm of animals known in popular culture for their bloodlust and voracious appetite has a powerful effect. Iceberg Chandelier was placed within the heart of Art Basel Miami, the American iteration of the Swiss fair launched in 2002, which had already been noted as a particularly intensely profit oriented event. As such Wong and Bauer’s piece likened the famed art fair to a feeding frenzy in which dealers, artists and clients (represented by the piranhas) were portrayed as menacingly ready to tear into the art for money (represented by the crystals). This resonates with the general attitude and craze towards luxury and consumption that emerged with new intensity in the art world during the early 2000s and which Tobias Wong often both put forward and criticised throughout his oeuvre.





Wong and Bauer’s use of crystals in Iceberg Chandelier, indicates that there is a second layer of meaning embedded within Transcendental Meditation as this later piece also features Swarovski crystals as its main medium. It was while working on Iceberg Chandelier that Wong and Bauer were approached by the Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver). Now renamed UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness, the Hellen Pitt gallery was founded in 1975 by students of the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art & Design where Tobias Wong studied). Its mission was to support and give a platform to emerging artists and art movements with counter-cultural, local, political, and queer resonances. When they solicited Wong and Bauer, they were preparing a show on the ‘Self-Help’ movement which was based on the philosophy that by acknowledging and sharing problems or difficult situations, individuals could work with others and find the strength to understand and improve their situations. Self-Help groups and communities were closely linked to the New Age spiritual and cultural movement that emerged in the US in the early 1970s. This movement refers to the formation of different religious communities which were often inspired by and borrowed elements from Native American religions, resulting in a broad range of practices and beliefs centred around holistic spirituality. At the core of this movement was the belief that heightened spiritual consciousness, personal transformation and healing would herald a ‘New Age’ of peace, light and love that would bring an end to war, poverty, hunger, racism, sickness, etc. It is a result of the success that such alternative religious, spiritual and philosophical practices found in North America and the West, that by the early 2000s hanging sun catchers or crystals in front of windows had become a visibly common, and therefore commodified, practice in Vancouver. These were appreciated for their aesthetic aspect, as the crystals served to refract natural sunlight projecting a rainbow of light spots into a room, alongside their perceived mystical and exotic spiritual value. As such, by using Swarovski crystal as the main medium for Transcendental Meditation, Wong and Bauer can also be said to have been gently poking fun at the commodification of the Self-Help movement and newly popular religious, spiritual, and philosophical practices. In this light, the piece’s title Transcendental Meditation can be considered to also contain an exaggerated and ironic tone, almost as if it were making fun of itself.

Sculpture, Transcendental Meditation; Designed by Tobias Wong (1974–2010); Collaborator: Amelia Bauer; swarovski crystals, metal, fishing wire; H x diam. (in tube): 36.2 × 6.4 cm (14 1/4 × 2 1/2 in.) L x W x D (overall): 43.8 × 36.8 × 1.3 cm (17 1/4 × 14 1/2 × 1/2 in.); The Tobias Wong Collection, Gift of Phyllis Chan and Gordon Wong; 2024-4-45