Hi All,

I look forward with great anticipation to this upcoming project both for the opportunity that this new artistic work provides for me and my collaborators and for the chance to return to Oakland Asian Cultural Center as a featured artist after an absence of nearly eight years. I have been impressed with the strides forward that OACC has made in recent years and am enjoying the working experience so far in planning this project.

For this work, I will be delving into my own history with and connection to the consciousness movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, which have been so vital in inspiring so many of our generation and generations since. In this context I wish to make a work that explores the complexity of the period through the eyes of my older brother Tom, who emigrated from Hong Kong with my parents as well as through my own recollection of growing up in this period of the emergence of Asian American consciousness.

It was in this period that young Asian Americans made the step of rejecting the term “oriental” and adopting the term “Asian American”. However, this pursuit of a new Asian American identity was a winding road (and continues to be). My brother’s path led him from UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies to the International Hotel (at the Wei Min garment factory cooperative) in San Francisco and into the tae kwan do (Korean martial art) community of the East Bay, a community that had major African American participation. So his own cultural identity during this period (his teens through his late 20’s) was an intricate hybrid of these experiences. In our relationship during this period his account of these experiences had a huge impact on me as I reached my own adulthood and pursued my own activist path.

Unfortunately, my brother passed away at the age of 30 of a drug overdose in 1982. I have since had a full career as an activist, community worker and professional artist and have committed much of my artistic life sharing stories about and memorializing our Asian American legacy. In this work I will reflect upon the many difficult experiences that our community has had endure and ultimately overcome on the way to our unique contribution to the American narrative. I have collaborated with spoken word artist, body builder and martial artist AK BLACK (Jim Wilson) for nearly 10 years and find in him someone who could grasp some of what my brother was going after and translate into a distinctive artistic expression. I am also blessed to have Lenora Lee, a younger generation dancer and choreographer with Chinatown roots to collaborate with AK on the movement component of the work. She and the other younger artists in this work, John Carlos Perea and Karl Evangelista, have given great hope and encouragement that the legacy of this historic period will have continued agency today and in the future.

 Fpr more info please click here.

Thanks for reading!

Francis Wong