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In the course of six years, Kristina Wong has become a powerful creative force. She uses her gender, background and ethnicity (Chinese-American) as source material for her art. She has won accolades, awards and a growing national audience. Wong’s work is compelling because it is, by turns, confrontational and candid, acerbic and guileless, cartoonish and so razor sharp it draws blood. Plus, she masterfully uses ambiguity to provoke thought. But, as Wong grows as an artist, by wading into more complex emotional territory, she finds herself in the unique and uncomfortable role of becoming an ironic kind of standard-bearer and emotional pillow for a significant and needy sector of her audience—Asian-American women.
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Cali Girl: Are You Ready for the Performance Art of Kristina Wong? – Milton Fletcher
“I experiment with interactive, improvisational performance that blurs ‘artist’ and ‘audience’—allowing both to be active in creating the message.”
—Kristina Wong
In the course of six years, Kristina Wong has become a powerful creative force. She uses her gender, background and ethnicity (Chinese-American) as source material for her art. She has won accolades, awards and a growing national audience. Wong’s work is compelling because it is, by turns, confrontational and candid, acerbic and guileless, cartoonish and so razor sharp it draws blood. Plus, she masterfully uses ambiguity to provoke thought.
But, as Wong grows as an artist, by wading into more complex emotional territory, she finds herself in the unique and uncomfortable role of becoming an ironic kind of standard-bearer and emotional pillow for a significant and needy sector of her audience—Asian-American women. This is a role she didn’t seek, doesn’t want and it’s beginning to drive her nuts. It appears that Wong has opened a Pandora’s box of communal neuroses.
How did this happen?
You see, the artist’s latest work, Wong Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—which is in previews and being fine-tuned for its official premiere in New York City in June—deals with the fact that mental illness runs very high among Asian-American women. Although Wong continually reminds the audience that the work is fiction (she has them chant the word “fiction” at key points during the performance) and depicts the illness in a hall-of-mirrors fashion—her persona, suggestively named “Kristina Wong,” is a manic character whose personality slowly unravels like the unfinished shapes she hand knits onstage—Wong’s depiction still hits some deep emotional nerves in a lot of her audience. Many times, Wong has found herself listening to wrenching personal stories from women that have seen her show and asked her for help. It has made for some touchy situations.
Wong shouldn’t be surprised that she is getting more than she bargained for with this reaction to Nest; other works of hers have also led to unexpected and disturbing results. One of the fundamental goals of her art is to see how people respond to her ideas. Wong knows that her work has the ability to fire up people beyond her expectations and she works hard to coax the audience into using their hearts and minds in this way.
Kristina Sheryl Wong was born and grew up in San Francisco. Wong was raised to be a competitor and an achiever. Her family encouraged her to have a strong work ethic, to excel in academics and ultimately to become a respectable and upwardly mobile professional, bringing pride to her family. Also, as Wong remembers, “I grew up around Asian women who seemed to accept that they were to be seen and not heard, and at that, not even seen.” However, being a born creative extrovert, Kristina couldn’t staunch the need to express herself or to be noticed. Wong participated in speech tournaments and performed in high school plays. It turned out that she was a natural performing in front of people. These experiences tapped into her talents and helped her to eventually become an artist.
Kristina continued to follow the family’s plan as closely as she could until she attended UCLA in the late 90s. It was here, majoring in World Arts & Cultures, that Wong was stimulated by creative writing, cultural studies and courses that encouraged her to experiment with theater, performance art and non-linear story telling. She was also exposed to activism and feminism, which further inflamed her intellect and inventiveness. Perhaps, most importantly, Wong’s college years provided her with the environment she needed to examine issues in her life and in the world at large. What she discovered from these explorations became the core material for her future professional work.
In 2000, Wong launched her first major art creation, BigBadChineseMama.com. The site is barbed confrontational satire mixed with edgy humor and was deceptively marketed to men who have a heavy dose of, ahem, “yellow fever.” “Mama” sends up online Asian porn and mail order bride websites. It was also conceived to challenge fellow activists. Wong: “I built it . . . not because I hated whitey or was so mad at the porn industry, but really because I was tired of armchair activist types who were very good at complaining about what they didn’t like seeing and were very bad at creating what they did like.” The result of this culture-jamming cherry bomb was over 130,000 web hits within a couple of months, interviews with the international media and requests for her to lecture. It also led to her being stalked by men and foot fetishists who took the site all too seriously. For Wong, “Mama” revealed the unanticipated and extreme responses that her interactive and interpretative art could arouse in others.
Armed with this insight, Wong created and performed Miss Chinatown 2nd Runner Up. The piece explores the coming of age of a contemporary Chinese-American young woman and the emotional turmoil that ensues from being subjected to unrealistic roll models, sexual repression and family expectations. It features a gigantic vagina and lots of fake blood—Carrie references abound. The response to this piece struck Wong closer to home; it caused tension with certain members of her family.
The burlesque offspring of the Miss Chinatown project was Wong’s vivid prank character, “Fannie Wong.” Kristina would crash Chinese-American beauty contests as “Fannie”—a foul-mouthed, pimple-faced, lap dancing, cigar smoking, whisky swigging contestant of a bygone beauty contest. It is Wong’s wickedly funny assault on the synthetic ideal of the “perfect” Chinese-American woman that has been a standard that Wong and others have been measured against. Sometimes Fannie would get ejected from the events, other times she could stay and raise hell because contest organizers, contestants and audience members thought Fannie was a real person and would indulge her eccentricities.
An essential key to understanding and enjoying Wong’s work is that it’s provocative, but not sensationalistic. It is satire and parody that is semi-fictional and meant to encourage the audience into thinking and hopefully realizing that the issues Wong raises are usually too entangled to have one pat, “correct,” answer or interpretation—like many situations in real life. The confusion arises when audience members don’t recognize Wong’s creative sensibilities and take her work solely as fact and truth.
As time has progressed, Wong has become more than a performance artist; she is an actor, activist, educator, filmmaker and writer. All these activities raise the question: is she spreading herself too thin? Will she burn out, or will she be able to juggle all these things simultaneously and flourish as an artist? Or will she chuck it all and go “Hollywood”? Perhaps only time and the results of Wong Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest will tell.
So far, the one family expectation she hasn’t yet rebelled against is the relentless work ethic. But, rebellion here doesn’t seem likely to happen. The last time I saw Wong, she was energetically pitching her Nest show to potential presenters at the Under The Radar alternative theater festival in Manhattan, with the drive of a truly challenging and adventurous and professional performaholic.
Milton Fletcher is director and curator of CyberGallery66.org
