Canada's Andy Warhol

Paul Wong, Canadian artist of Chinese origin, currently touring India, is one of the early pioneers of video art who have shaped contemporary artists through their experiments with video and sound, using it to accentuate or subvert reality, or highlight aspects of it such as gender, sexuality, and identity.

Entirely self-taught, as he confessed to contemporary artist Amitesh Grover during a conversation about his life and art at Kolkata's Shrine Empire Gallery, where an exhibition mounted of three of his recent public art projects stands, Wong was a teenager when he first picked up a hand-held Sony Portapack video camera in the 1970s. The effect, he said, was liberating, and opened up a world of possibilities.

Wong and his friends formed an 'art gang' called the Mainstreeters (they lived along Vancouver's Main Street) and went about video-graphing themselves and their activities – planting a garden, walking down the street, playing checkers and blowing bubbles in a park, and so on.

Not all of the videos were thus innocuous and innocent, many were carefully staged and quite dark.

Among the best known of these are 60 Unit Bruise (1976), showing Kenneth Fletcher, Wong's fellow Mainstreeter, drawing 60 units of blood from his arm and injecting it into Wong's naked shoulder; over the course of the five-minute video, a dark bruise can be seen spreading across Wong's skin. Then there's In Ten Sity, an intense video in which Wong slam-dances to punk rock inside an 8'x8'x8' cell.

Also famous, is Wong's 1984 work, Confusing: Sexual Views, a nine-hour video of 27 people talking unabashedly about their sexuality. It was taken off at the last minute by the gallery that was to show it, and when Wong took the gallery to court, his suit was dismissed because the video was deemed was 'not art'. The case, became a rallying point for censorship, and the debate about what's art and what's not.

Clearly Wong, who is sometimes likened to Andy Warhol, presaged many of the concerns, forms and practices of contemporary artists – the engagement with the body, the everyday and performance, for instance, or conflating the public/political with the private, the foregrounding of sexuality, especially queerness, the use of social practices, media and installation.

At 64 now, Wong's interests have expanded, moved in other directions, looking at his artworks at the Shrine Empire.

These include race, heritage, memory and identity, which form the basis of Mother's Cupboard, a series of large format photographs of mayonnaise and coffee jars in which his mother stored traditional Chinese medicines and herbs, which were made into cutouts displayed at bus shelters across Vancouver some months ago. It's Wong's way of signposting the racial discrimination of Chinese migrants in Canada – they were allowed to vote only as recently as 1949). Wong's public art project was commissioned by the Vancouver city administration, which issued an apology to its minority residents in April this year.

Wong's engagement with new media continues but it now encompasses the latest in social media and technology. Year of GIF (2013) is a video projection of over 350 GIF files drawn from an archive of images shot by Wong and mashed into a random sequence. The artwork was originally projected on a 120 x 30ft screen that could be viewed by passengers travelling on Vancouver's metropolitan rail system.

Five Octave Range, the third artwork, continues Wong's interest in technology and public spaces. Originally mounted as a four-screen audio-visual installation at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza, it is a five-minute loop playing the distorted, exaggerated visuals and voices of five opera singers across the vocal range. As viewers stand close and let the voices screech, coalesce, dissonate and echo around them, it presents this venerable, elite and alienating form of music in a playful, accessible way. "Wacky", as Wong calls it.