Presented by Euphrat Museum of Art and Sunnyvale Creative Arts Center Gallery

Accompanying the exhibition Oct 29 – Dec 12, 1998, dedicated to the memory of artist Bernice Bing.

Flo Oy Wong received the 1997 Media/New Genre Award from the Arts Council Silicon Valley for the quality of her work and professional achievement.  The exhibition and writing are ways to honor this award winner who has created art that has touched people near and far, and who has collaborated personally and through organizations in ways that address major cultural, historical, and political issues of the day.

Jan Rindfleisch
Director, Euphrat Museum of Art

made in usa: Angel Island Shhh, a current project is exemplary.  Wong has a personal interest in the Angel Island Immigration Station, where interrogation of Chinese immigrants occurred from 1910-1940.  Her mother and three older sisters were processed at the station.  She is creating artwork in the form of a series of U. S. flags constructed from rice sacks.  Each work is a tribute to someone who had to assume a false identity, such as a “paper husband” or a “paper sister.”  In one aspect her work is about local history, a healing voice for the elderly Chinese community, and building pride, understanding, and positive self-identity in the Chinese American community today.  She will interview people, record their stories, and incorporate portions in her art.  But other aspects are national in scale.  Angel Island has not been valued as Ellis Island on the East Coast.  Moreover, the National Archives and Records Administration wants to move the historical records to the Midwest.  Wong calls attention to the history of Asian Americans in the U. S. and their power to retain it, study it, and shape it.  The art is multifaceted, including working with family and community, with Kearny St. Workshop, an activist cultural organization in San Francisco, with Angel Island staff for an on-site installation, with the cybergroup Save Our National Archives, with poets, historians, and filmmakers who provide other avenues to accessing this history, and recently with school children in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Wong’s art and activism have spanned disciplines, cultures, and generations.  She has served on the national board of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and co founded the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA).  She was awarded artist residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in Omaha, Nebraska and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts in Saratoga, California.  In 1998 she won a Serpent Source grant and also became the first recipient of the Asian American Arts Foundation/Djerassi Artists Program Grant.  She was a founding member of the Sunnyvale Arts Commission (1982) and helped to organize the city’s public art policy, and has served on the Board of Directors of Arts Council Silicon Valley.  In 1983 she was also a Board Member of Asian Americans for Community Involvement, and in 1984 began a six-year involvement with Asian Heritage Council, organizing tow major shows with Asian Americans.  She has taught youth in the area for years, tying in her ideas of making art with greater awareness of world events as experienced by ordinary people.

The Baby Jack Rice Story is another work crossing many boundaries of age, race, culture, and art/history.  The work consists of rice sacks silkscreened with photographic images of boyhood friends of Edward K. Wong, her husband, and embellished with threads and sequins to make reference to relationships and cultural identity.  The Wongs collaborated on an accompanying video.  Ed Wong grew up in Augusta, Georgia, in the segregated South of the 1940s and 1950s, where his close friends were African Americans.  After their marriage the Wongs traveled to Augusta several times to visit and to search for his childhood friends.  They returned again in 1993 to do research with Cush Cade.  Ultimately the pair created an artwork that historically recorded personal relations and called attention to greater understanding of U. S. history vis a vis the social and work relationships between Chinese and African Americans earlier in this century.  Much of the series was created while Flo Oy Wong was a resident at Headlands, and it has been featured in a Smithsonian exhibition.

Wong’s work goes beyond family, and she has, continued to seek out cross-cultural collaborations.  In Fall 1996 during a three-month residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, she sought out women of color and discovered two artists, sculptor Reese Crawford-Tocho and photographer Pamela J. Berry, both African American who had stories of Chinese American relatives in the past.  Together they created a collaborative work using photography, sculpture, textiles, and food to raise larger issues about race and identity.  The project continued by and phone when Wong returned to Sunnyvale.  Kente Rice Women: Talking Our Connection was exhibited at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1997.

In August 1997, Wong took a trip to South Africa and met with Sandra Proselandis, the director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town.  District six, once a unique instance of multicultural living, was a region that had been demolished over the years in the name of apartheid.  “In 1966,” Museum records state, “District Six was declared a ‘white’ group area.  Shortly afterwards the first bulldozers moved in. . . .”  Wong responded to the injustice towards the people who had been robbed of their home sand history.  In her District Six artwork she talks of racism and race relations in an international manner – bringing home to the U. S. the story of this community, which had a history of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.  She calls attention to a museum which stimulates and contains the intense outpouring of memory and feeling of people who have lost their place in time – a museum built around street signs now signposting only memories.

When the Tiananmen Massacre occurred (June 4, 1989), tears mingled with ink as she painted seven works in her Tiananmen Series, expressing her outrage over soldiers shooting at students.  Bitter Melon Rice Blues: Elegy for America (1992, Berkeley Art Center) was an interactive altar of Chinese paper and food offerings, addressing racism and hate crimes, and dedicated to the memory of Vincent Chin and other Asian Americans who had died over the past ten years because of anti-Asian violence.  I Don’t Remember Where the Chinese Cook Lived, a 1994 installation at the Falkirk Gallery, was a tribute to the Chinese cook who once worked at the Falkirk mansion and about whom little was known;  Wong installed a bed and mini shrines to create a place for his soul to rest and handprinted a history of Chinese in Marin County.

A large part of Wong’s approach as an artist has been towards reclaiming histories and identities and bettering relations between peoples.  In 1989 she began a project with artist-activist Betty Kano that resulted in the founding of the Asian American Women Artists Association (the founding at near the same time as Godzilla, a similar organization, in New York), which continues to be very active about the inclusion of Asian American women as a vital part of American art history.  At one of their meetings they invited the Guerilla Girls and had frank discussions with them about the politics of color, its hierarchy, that Asian American women have been the missing component.  In 1989 also, Wong became involved with the national Women’s Caucus for Art (in 1991 joined the National Board of Directors of the WCA) and proceeded to develop with others the Women of Color in Art slide series for use by arts institutions, art teachers, and others who had not had access to the breadth and quality of art produced by women of color.  (These sets are available from the Universal Slide Company of Sarasota, Florida.)  In 1990 she was project director for the exhibition Completing the Circle: Six Artists which was part of Festival 2000 in San Francisco and was supposed to travel to China, until the events at Tiananmen Square severed plans.  She co-curated an empowering show with Diane Tani Object as Identity at 1078 Gallery in Chi (1993).  Wong wrote an essay, “There’s More to Being Chinese in America than Chop Suey: Narrative Drawings as Criticism in Oakland Chinatown,” part of the anthology Pluralistic Approaches to Art Criticism (1992), edited by Kristin G. Congdon and Doug Blandy.  She herself was the subject of the catalog Flo Oy Wong (1992) in conjunction with a solo show at the Antonio Prieto Gallery, Mills College.  It was published by Visibility Press, Berkeley, with a major essay by art historian Moira Roth and introductions by artist Hung Liu and arts writer Lucy Lippard.

In 1995 as part of the delegation from WCA, Wong attended the International Women’s Conference in China.  She participated in and moderated an NGO Forum panel on Chinese American women artists and co-coordinated the group’s color Xerox art exhibition.  She extended her art to people around the globe, asking conferees and others to sign their names to a rice sack she brought along, part of her Asian Rice Sack Series.

In 1997, her art and activism mixed at the invitation of Curator Timothy Burgard of the de Young Museum.  He asked her to focus on the collection, help develop a show to reflect on the theme of “identity,” and write for the catalog.  Wong suggested that he contemporize the project by including more women and people of color, and cited specific artists.  In this collaboration, Wong addressed identity issues for artists and the identity of the de Young itself, offering ways to improve the permanent collection of a major U. S. institution and to make it more representative of American culture.

This essay on Wong started with her recent work.  A key piece in understanding her life’s work is Eye of the Rice: Yu Mai Gee Fon (15’x26’ in 1997).  Wong began sewing on rice sacks in 1978 and started her ongoing Oakland Chinatown Series of graphite drawings in 1983, but it was in 1986 that she combined the idea of recording Chinese American history with sewing and altering rice sacks, sacks often donated by friends.  The work originally was intended as a tribute to Chinese immigrants and their struggles, but after several years she realized it recalled her childhood memories of Chinatown in Oakland, where her family owned a restaurant.  At one point, when bills were piling up, her father was shot after an incident in which he allegedly embezzled some money to feed his family.  The family survived on rice donated by others.  The Wong-family history is complex because half of her siblings were born in China, half in the United States, and there were many “paper” relatives and family secrets, which are still coming to light.  Thus, from early memories has grown a huge patchwork of rice sacks, images, an ideas, which has continued to this day, as Wong charts her journey, family history, and addresses political, gender and race related concerns.

In her art, Wong uses color in Western and Chinese ways, and employs English and Chinese text, taking the responsibility of explaining her use of Chinese words and symbols.  She uses the colloquial Cantonese phrase bay min: to give face, to show respect.  Thus she gives written form to po toong wah, the spoken language she grew up with in America.  Included in Eye of the Rice are Chinese words such as neuy (female), mai (raw rice), seong dung (first class), and at the focal point oy (love-also Wong’s middle name).

That Wong has chosen a food staple, rice, to be a common element in her art is not only because of her early days helping in her family’s restaurant.  Rice is symbolic of her Chinese heritage but also is a staple shared with other cultures.  It is spiritual nourishment.  In Rice-ing (1993) (a rocking horse in a rice circle), it was a way of “blessing my children.”  Rice and other food continue as a part her art in multiple ways, for example she has organized dinners to celebrate powerful women artists, inviting women to honor each other with an evening of sharing art and food.

Gender issues surface in her art and activism.  Wong was the sixth girl born in her family; she learned only as a teenager that her mother cried at her birth because she had wanted a boy.  However, because her brother Bill was born after her, she soon became the girl who brought the son, the “lucky daughter.”  Wong relates this story to her suitcase series, My Mother’s Baggage.  The second in this series is show at the Triton Museum of Art (1998).  Wong is keenly aware of injustices to women and girls in Eastern and Western cultures.  “The strong sense of ‘others’ in our life, influenced by the Confucius ethic of societal structure and order in China, dominated the infrastructure of my family. . .For me to be an artist from a traditional transplanted Asian culture – which did not support self expression and which denied the value of females – is self enlightening.”  At one point Wong experimented with the image of the phoenix, because “it rose from the ashes.  For me, rising from the ashes is a distinctly female survival experience.”

She tells the stories.  She empowers others.  “My work honors working class families who were so important to the building up of America.  It is an American story.”

Wong looks for the extraordinary in the ordinary, the unusual person in the common predicament, the others who battle racism, sexism, discrimination resulting from sexual orientation, neglect or eradication of history.  Soon she will be connecting with people of Chinese ancestry in Cuba, Chinese who have so intermarried and intermingled with African and Latino cultures over 150 years that they are in danger of losing a part of themselves.  “They want chopsticks, a camera to record things.”  Wong would like to help them reclaim the Chinese part of their heritage.  Locally she has participated in a college symposium on California history, worked with at-risk junior high-students in the county, and taught elementary students for years in her own city of Sunnyvale.

As the Arts Council Silicon Valley honors her, as Sunnyvale honors her, we who have worked with her and have been moved by her art over the years honor her also and look anew at the meaning and value of “honoring” in the context of cultural change.