blood. Wong describes one of these works as a metaphor for the “loss of innocence,” though not necessarily her own. A darker brutality seeps into this body of work via a birthday cake sitting atop blankets that Wong writes she had “cut up and decimated” in a performance. In a contemporaneous work, Crevice (1992), Wong took on the role of a detective, spending “several hours inspecting the crevices in a paneled wood wall at the San Francisco Art Institute” and listening to any sounds emanating from those gaps. Though these pieces do not all relay specific narratives, they read as excerpts of an autobiography centered on bold and vulnerable confrontations with trauma. The artist emerges as a witness to events that cannot quite be named. After completing her graduate studies, Wong addressed similar themes in a softer, more abstract mode. Her color photographs of the late 1990s depict halos, shadows, refractions, and the spotlit corner of a room. Their titles read as an outlined process of recovery: Altar , Absence , Mother , Presence , Recall , Recognition , Transformation (all 1997). Then, in the following decade, Wong created an outpouring of more specific representations of violence, through paintings and drawings that bear a high-contrast representational style reminiscent of her earliest work. Depicting refugees, detainees, war victims, and other people in conditions of instability and unrest, they suggest a subconscious effort to locate her story in relation to others. Wong began weaving together these bodies of work, these many harmed bodies, in the 2010s, with sculptural pieces such as Gathering (2014), Float (2014), Constellation (2017), and Recollection (2017), all made of materials used to anchor, contain, repair, and connect: thread, gauze, plastic bags, yarn, rope. Recalling the spatialized drawings of Gego or the materially inventive suspensions of Eva Hesse, these fiber installations are hung on the wall or from the ceiling, arranged in three dimensions to occupy space as cobweb-like nets. Wong’s smaller related pieces of this period—often involving slivers and
other shapes cut from colorfully patterned watercolors and drawings that were reconfigured into tangled and layered compositions—bear titles such as Arachne (2020), Athena (2020), Bia (2020), Demeter (2019), and Persephone (2020), referring to the Greek goddesses. Though none of these works are representational, their titles invoke female figures who faced great challenges; their triumphs and defeats were woven into the cultural fabric. Wong channels their ideals of persistence and healing through her labor-intensive process and her fragile but interconnected materials. Though still complex, this set of works might look like an optimistic offshoot from Wong’s earlier works, or a turning away from the visual traces of violence or trauma—their palettes and compositions feel delicate, pretty. Yet Wong’s earlier experiences with trauma, grieving, and healing continue to surface and intermingle with a sense of levity and exuberance. Room-sized fiber installations such as Mind/Mountain (2018), Mind/Forest (2018), and Grandfather Dragon (2019) hang like a fog, their tulle netting resembling the hazy lace of neural networks. Grandfather Dragon , in particular, marks a shift in palette, employing more ochre and earth-toned hues, or the purples and yellows of a bruise. We also see this affective layering in a number of contemporaneous wall-hung works that set candle smoke against sewn transparencies. Wong began using smoke to lightly singe and darken her materials, referencing again the contrast of light and dark, absence and presence, while more specifically alluding to a sensory space of vigil or prayer. In pieces from 2020, segments of colored pencil and graphite on drafting film and gouache on paper are cut into shapes evoking flames ( Persephone 1 ) or swirls of dust and wind ( Persephone 2 and Persephone 3 ). Works from 2021 named after Icarus and the phoenix directly point to themes of escape and rebirth. Though these works, too, are largely abstract, the forms in these and many of Wong’s most recent pieces recall
28
29
Mira Dayal
Following the Lines
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online