Gary Wong
Born in Oakland, California, my mother’s parents had an SRO hotel, bathhouse and barbershop next to Chinatown there. My father’s parents had a restaurant and bakery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As that young child, I was fascinated by the colorful characters that frequented these establishments.
Before long, we moved to Los Angeles when City Hall was the tallest building in the basin and electric trolleys crisscrossed the streets. While I grew up in LA’s vast cultural diversity, all of it informing my artistic sensibility, my interest in my Asian culture eventually centered my life in Chinatown. As an art student, I worked at a local motel here, and I began a long association in the martial arts world. For years I danced for the family association Lung Kung Tin Yee and Sifu Wei Bok. I developed a deep devotion to the rituals and performance of lion dancing in the South China style. Eventually we made the break, Sifu sent us out on our own and we formed East Wind South China Lion Dancers. As a group drifted from one Chinatown family association to the next searching for a home base. We eventually landed at Alpine Recreation Center where East Wind has been headquartered to this day. This relationship has continued through my children, to my grandchildren. Through my East Wind experience I have seen the myriad changes L.A. Chinatown has and continues to go through as the ongoing face of Los Angeles itself morphs into the future.
My art today, consciously/unconsciously navigates the ancient and contemporary aesthetics of my heritage and current world view. In some way I suppose I’m always processing my experiences with my aesthetic, that is to say the two will come together somewhere down the line. As an Asian American I feel outside. As an artist I have no problem. As an Asian American artist I have sometimes been made to feel that Asians are supposed to have a special mystique and design sense. I have never known what that is supposed to mean but I know I’m not a designer. I am an American with Chinese heritage. I am an artist whose eyes are trained in the language of paint and whose work meanders through the pantheon of American Abstract Painting and the problems inherent in the genre and the discovering one’s own voice in the process. The basic reason I paint is as old as Mankind itself, the need to make a mark, to leave a message.
I previously worked in the manipulating and layering of recognizable figures and images with words. Over the years I increasingly found myself becoming disinterested in the myriad interpretations of the work. The work was leaning towards autobiographical-storytelling, not an intended direction as I am not interested in illustrating a point of view or political point. I started focusing more on the physical aspects of a painting, the ground, the surface, the texture, the marks, and the visual richness of layered and distressed paint. I began to eliminate any semblance of recognizable imagery through a synthesis of myths, ancient history, mantras, poems and songs as written. The purpose of which is to bring to focus the energy and purely visual aspect of that text without the interjection of one’s psyche’s interpretation of that which is recognizable. The words conversation and rhythm comes to mind, the visual energy of a story told again and again. The marks, once made, inform the next and the next, and the once silent dialogue morphs into a visual conversation.