Celebrating her upcoming 70th birthday and three decades of work, Chinese American artist Flo Oy Wong’s exhibit, 70/30: Seventy Years of Living, Thirty Years of Art, is on view May 1 through 25 at SomArts Cultural Center on 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco.
In 1978, after working in her family’s Oakland Chinatown restaurant and raising a family of her own, Wong turned her eye to the process of making art. Engaging in the dialogues of contemporary art, she began to create work that offered glimpses and stories of ordinary and often overlooked people. Wong uses rice sacks, rice, sequins, beads, suitcases, flags of the United States, scanned photographs and found objects to create large-scale installation pieces.
Born and raised in the East Bay, Wong has received awards from the Euphrat Museum of Art at De Anza College, the Women’s Caucus for Art, Kearny Street Workshop, the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and the city of Sunnyvale.
Included in 70/30: Seventy Years of Living, Thirty Years of Art will be seminal pieces from each of Wong’s series, as well as some early figurative drawings and process paintings. Wong has also created a new piece for the exhibit, “My Sister: Li Hong,” about her 86-year-old developmentally disabled sister that explores the humanity of her sibling’s life, a story of survival and compassion.
Curated by Nancy Hom, the exhibit is a part of Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s annual month-long celebration, United States of Asian America Festival. Admission to the exhibit is free. For more information:
(415) 864-4126 or apiculturalcenter.org.