they unfold in the pages that follow. Tune your ear to the book’s repetitious rhythms, focus your eye on the motifs that recur.
Aya Karpin´ska
Wong’s practice, which spans painting, performance, installation, textile, drawing, and photography, is indisputably varied. Not every work in her oeuvre can be assimilated into a grand narrative—into what Sedgwick might call a “strong theory.” Yet, in developing an editorial framework for this book, I have sought to make visible the delicate threads that stitch the disparate elements of Wong’s practice together, treating Mending Body/Mending Mind as an index and lodestar. The first section, “Fragments and Experiments,” explores the varied ways that Wong worked through themes of sexual violence, domestic instability, and trauma in her early practice. The second section, “To Connect and Repair,” presents her pivot toward abstraction, a method that has empowered her to assemble the part-objects of her past into a whole that might offer nourishment and restitution. Mira Dayal’s essay, which surveys Wong’s archive, and Bryce Wilner’s graphic design extend this structure. Line drawings derived from the textiles in Mending Body/Mending Mind undergird the title pages, while stills from Al Wong’s video punctuate the book’s beginning and end, marking time. This book arrives at the midpoint in Wong’s career. Nearly four decades stand behind—we can only hope that several more stand before. As I close out this essay, I think of the words that end the poem for Mending Body/Mending Mind : “I know. I continue.”
I. transform
II. death
i remember, i remember wanting to love you tender as you were
take my silence give it a shape large enough to carry me across
how do you tell your teenage daughter: this is no ordinary hurt how do you tell your teenage daughter: silence was my way to endure
take memory knife at my throat in my own home a knife at my throat take this outrage wrap it in silk repair the holes that it left behind i am still here i am still here in the soft movements of your fingers that hold the hand of terror so i am not alone
but silence is also a kind of lie a beautiful lie to keep intact, to protect
let my voice be here not as sound but as light and shadow:
i know, i continue i know, i continue
and time is no veil to healing in the embrace of this moment
i am yours and you are my celebration
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Elizabeth Wiet
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