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Critical Mass: Hope @ St. Hope
- Flo Oy Wong
Rice Sacks
for the People
- Barbara Hatchett
Angel Island History
- William Wong
Flo Oy Wong:
Storyteller and Cultural Worker
- B. Stephen Carpenter, II
Flo Oy Wong: Honoring
- Jan Rindfleisch
Art AsiaPacific
Review
- Collette Chattopadhyay
Baby Jack Rice Story
- Terri
Cohn
Flo
Oy Wong Saves Lives
- Joy Ritchie
Bill Whisp Essay
- Bill Whisp
A Chinese Griot
- Kim Curry-Evans
Telling Untold Stories
- Melanie Anne Herzog |
Baby Jack Rice Story
Terri Cohn
San Francisco Bay writer and art historian
Reprinted with permission.
The largest ongoing cycle of pieces in the Asian
Rice Sack Series is the Baby Jack Rice
Story, an ever-metamorphosing installation of
rice sacks, photo-silkscreened with images of two households:
one, the Chinese American family of her husband, Edward K.
Wong; and the other, the African American household of Cush
and Boykin Cade, childhood friends of her husband. Articulated
with handsewn text that accompanies the images screened on
each sack, the series is narrated from the perspective of
Ed's memories of growing up in the segregated American South
during the 1930s and 40s. The juxtaposition of photo-silkscreened
images of Ed Wong and the Cades has great meaning in the context
of the racially complex milieu of their personal childhood
experiences, as well as the concept that the photographs impose
personal history on the images of cultural representation.
While the rice sacks are a fine foil for the visual and written
narrative communicated by the Baby Jack Rice Story,
the racially integrative component of the tale is personally
augmented by the name of the series, which was an African
American translation of a term of endearment, "be be jai"
(baby son), that Ed's mother used for him; and politically
by the fact that the Chinese Americans and African Americans
in Augusta lived and worked in the same neighborhoods. African
Americans in the South also were traditionally rice growers
and rice eaters as well. In pursuing their inquiry into Ed's
childhood history, Flo and Ed Wong have located numbers of
other protagonists in the narrative, including the Dawsons,
who lived on Wrightsboro Road; and Howard Woo whose uncle
purchased Ed's father's store after they left for California.
By reclaiming this living history, the artist has infused
the Baby Jack Rice Story with vitality as both
a personal epic and as a work of art.
With the Baby Jack Rice Story,
Wong again pays tribute to the cross cultural influences on
her artistic vision, in this case technically as well as conceptually.
With the series, Wong has expanded her ongoing exploration
of color and its symbolism, appropriating red to refer to
Chinese culture and good luck, and brown to symbolize African
Americans. She has also moved into a new realm of media exploration
by photo-silkscreening directly on the rice sacks. Recognizing
the remarkable power of the Baby Jack images
in juxtaposition with the textual aspect of the rice sacks,
she pays respect to Robert Rauschenberg and his early avant
garde experiments with serigraphy on cardboard boxes, a non-traditional
material. Equally profound in the context of this series was
Wong's consistent use of handsewn narrative, inspired by Faith
Ringgold's various Quilt Series, in which Ringgold
masterfully integrates images and text in a handquilted framework.
This meaningful facet of Baby Jack continues Wong's recognition
of the authoritative end to which "women's work" has been
employed in contemporary art.
A griot, keeper of the Chinese "talk
story" tradition, and humanitarian witness and chronicler
of the integrative milieu that she has chosen to document
and visualize hopefully for the future, Wong's artistic vision
also nurtures like jook, the Chinese rice soup prepared
for occasions of comfort. Reminiscent of Blake's famous poetic
line, to see a world in a grain of sand Flo Oy Wong's
holistic uses of rice can be appreciated as countless extraordinary
fragments of her life, melded together to partially fill a
bowl that awaits its next layer of warm sustenance.
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