A Critical Mass: Hope @ St. Hope
- Flo Oy Wong

Rice Sacks for the People
- Barbara Hatchett

Angel Island History
- William WongRice

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

Art AsiaPacific Review

Issue 36 (2002)
Collette Chattopadhyay

Flo Oy Wong – United States

Flo Oy Wong’s recent works, shown at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, explore issues of family and community history in relation to ethnicity, nationality and identity. A collaboration of installations which examines the nature of what it means to be an American of Chinese ancestry, Wong’s art bears similarities to literary biographies and autobiographies inasmuch as it constructs narratives of individual lives and experiences.

The exhibition opened with made in usa: Angel Island Shhh, 2000, an installation comprising a suite of wall-hangings, beneath which were small bowls of raw rice dyed red, white or blue. While the rice functions as a symbol of Asian eating habits, its colouration wryly references the American flag, announcing in the process a theme of Americanisation. The wall-hangings themselves play off the legacies of both Chinese and American art traditions. While their physical fabric-based essence alludes to classical Chinese hanging scrolls, they lack the usual vertical orientation, bamboo supports, silk brocade backgrounds and ink-brush imagery that characterize traditional scrolls. Simultaneously, they nod towards the western tradition of stretched canvas paintings, but follow that tradition no more than they do the inherited traditions of the East. For although easel-sized, horizontal images, the works are neither stretched on wooden frames nor painted with oil or acrylic. Intentionally conflating existing art-object categories, these component images raise the theme of bi-cultural identity, suggesting its multilayered state of consciousness as one that steps beyond the usual borders of nationality, culture, and even racial origin.

Thematically, Angel Island Shhh depicts individual immigration stories dating back to the early twentieth century. These are narrated by means of stenciled lettering hand-stamped onto cloth rice sacks, which in turn are machine-sewn onto fabricated American flags. Each image presents the story of a Chinese-born individual who emigrated to the United States through the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Although each experience is mounted on an American flag, the flags are almost obscured by the rice sacks, suggesting the exaggerated emphasis on heritage that Chinese and Asian émigrés often face in the United States. Furthermore, the scroll-cum-paintings collectively have a homogeneous appearance that mocks what for decades has been perceived as a general Euro-American insensitivity to distinguishing individuality among Chinese Americans.

The installation focuses exclusively on the early twentieth century when American immigration laws discriminated against Chinese people through a series of exclusionary Acts established in 1882. Under these laws, Chinese-American citizens were allowed to bring children and siblings into the United States, but not spouses. This engendered the forging of secret identities whereby wives entered the United States claiming to be aunts or sisters, while husbands entered as uncles or brothers.

The complexities of such identities are further explored and deconstructed in Wong’s suitcase installation, My Mother’s Baggage: Paper Sister/Paper Aunt/Paper Wife, 1998. With a reference to Duchamp’s Green Box, 1934, which was produced in an edition of 300, My Mother’s Baggage transform six ordinary suitcases, that once belonged to Wong’s mother, into a collection of ready-mades. Unlike Duchamp’s work, which accentuates the replication of an image, Wong’s installation uses luggage as a metaphorical link between an initial physical journey and a life-long evolution of exterior and interior identities. Hidden within each suitcase are faded sepia photographs and collaged words that recount the perennially shifting layers of truth and fiction that were implicit in the émigré experience of Wong’s mother. What unfolds is a biographical narrative of double-consciousness that emphasizes the legal and personal dilemmas experienced by women who came to the United States to join their husbands, but who were officially restricted by the United States government from entering as wives. Assuming ‘paper’ identities as sisters and aunts who married ‘paper’ husbands in name only, they and their Chinese-born children led complicated lives in the United States where the line between what was legal and illegal was continually blurred.

Wong’s most recent work, Kindred Spirit, 2001 suggests that the hybrid identity of Chinese-Americans is not yet something of the past. This installation pays tribute to Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was recently imprisoned by the United States Justice Department on suspicion of espionage. Set against a crimson silk background, an off-white, quilted rice sack strained by 278 bags of oolong tea, Kindred Spirit presents selected details of Wen’s clash with American rules and regulations. Accentuating themes of displacement and alienation, this work extends into the present the struggles for equality that continue to define the experiences of Asian-Americans.

Flo Oy Wong: Angel Island, Immigration and Family Stories, Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, 29 September 2001-31 March 2002.

Reprinted with permission from Collette Chattopadhyay, 2003