Rice Sacks for the People
Barbara Hatchett
A definite item to be added to one’s December itinerary is the solo show of Flo Oy Wong’s work at the Flomenhaft Gallery in New York. Mrs. Wong is a West Coast-based artist whose mixed-media constructions meditate on questions of racial and gender identity, family, history and international culture. Wong is also interested in exploring the formal values of the assemblage technique, drawing inspiration from masters of the practice including Faith Ringgold, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
The artist explains the breadth of her artistic practice: "My work, inspired by European and American avant-garde and traditional crafts, reflects my efforts to blur the boundaries of high art and low art, fine art and crafts. My technique of blurring is symbolic of my identity as an American of Chinese descent." Taken as a whole, the artist’s oeuvre can be somewhat dizzying in its scope and diversity–in simply scanning the myriad formal and thematic approaches integrated into her work, one gets the sense that this artist’s mind is seldom content to repeat successful formulas.
Wong’s upcoming solo show will be a testament to the way her work, in its variety of mode and content, mirrors the way people must have a heightened consciousness of the diversity of cultures in their world. Exhibited will be works from the artist’s "Kindred Spirit" series, which sheds light on political oppression through the use of traditional materials and objects. The title of the series refers to the codename of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department centering on Wen Ho Lee, who was imprisoned after being accused of indiscretions involving secret nuclear data. As a result of this inquest, Lee spent 278 days in solitary confinement. Wong based her "Kindred Spirit" series around the rice sack, a symbol rich in associations with the very things Lee was deprived of in prison–namely food, family, and a sense of home. While the formal beauty of the pieces can distract from the iconography, there is a heady logic behind the artist’s choices. For example, in Kindred Spirit #1, the red and gold of the luminous sequins actually refer to good luck in traditional Chinese culture. Meanwhile, a text relating Lee’s experience is arranged so as to subvert the Western method of reading–here the viewer must follow the format of the Chinese scroll, which reads from the top down, and from right to left.
Another dynamic series included in the show is "Rice Sacks for my Siblings," an ongoing project that Wong began in 1992. In these pieces, the artist stakes out new territory between biography, history and materiality. Here, Wong deploys her signature rice sacks for a different purpose–as portraits both of family members and of specific periods in her family history. The figure of the rice sack vividly and literally recalls a time in the 1940s when her family did not have enough money for rice–thus, the signifier and the signified merge in a single, powerful object. Wong uses the rice sacks as canvases, bringing their surfaces to life by sewing on colored thread, beads and sequins. The emphasis on traditional handicrafts, while celebrating the family environment, also recalls the work of various first-wave feminist artists who have influenced Wong. "I come from a feminist pedagogy, having been influenced by the women’s art movement of the 70s. Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and others spoke volumes to me when they gained attention."
The narrative impulse displayed in "Rice Sacks for my Siblings" is continued in Baby Jack Rice Story, a mixed-media installation chronicling the childhood of Wong’s husband in Augusta, Georgia, during the time of segregation. Baby Jack Rice Story is an expansive environment where scrolls, and the memories poignantly layered on them, dominate the psychic space of the room. The weaving together of history and craft recalls the practice of family quilt-making. The piece is an attempt to make sense of the tangles of memory–therefore some chaos is to be expected: words interacting with images (sometimes overlapping them), irregular zones of color, jagged edges. And yet Wong succeeds in tying the organic strands of two family histories together into a coherent, unified whole. The installation can be conceived of as a kind of rescue mission bent on recovering the past. Hung Liu, artist and professor at Mills College, writes: "Flo Wong has substituted her art and her endless passion for what has been lost–stories that can never be fully recovered in words and pictures, but which, as if woven into a common surface, have the quality of having been reclaimed." Baby Jack Rice Story is an eloquent tribute to a man, a family, a culture and an era.
Baby Jack Rice Story was involved in the stylistic genesis of another project to be shown at the Flomenhaft Gallery: "made in usa: Angel Island Shhh," a mixed-media work using American flags, Wong’s trademark rice sacks, and a variety of other craft materials. The artist began the project after hearing various grueling stories of the experiences of Chinese immigrants at the Angel Island Immigration Station–some of which are her own family’s stories. "I made these pieces of embellished rice sacks sewn onto flags of the U. S. because I explored the secret identities of Chinese immigrants detained and interrogated in the United States from 1910-1950. I had a personal reason to do this because my mother entered the U. S. under a false identity. Because of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law and subsequent immigration acts, Chinese women who were wives of laborers could not enter this country legally."
The "Angel Island" series has a decidedly political bent–it is certainly a criticism of inhumanities perpetrated by the United States government. However, Wong is never one to lapse into mere propaganda; it is a work of art first and foremost, visually arresting and evocative of formal as well as social questions. While Jasper Johns used the American flag to investigate the nature of signifiers, symbols, and human perception, Wong uses the flag as a starting point for a more personal and historical narrative, reminding us that a flag is also a piece of craftsmanship by amalgamating it with her signature material, the rice sack. The result is a haunting, affecting portrait of the Chinese-American immigrant experience, which was tied equally to hopefulness and anxiety.
The only constant in the art of Flo Wong is a constant desire to evolve, bringing to light new questions and ideas in a way that is as spirited as it is intellectual, as formally beautiful as it is bold. Other projects to be included in the show are "Bitter Melon Rice Blues: Elegy for America," "My Mother’s Baggage: Paper Sister/Paper Aunt/Paper Wife," and other untitled new works.<
