“Cocooning: The Third Eye Dolls”
Piwowarczyk: Could you tell me a little bit about the show you’re
in right now? It’s called
“New World Order: Humanity.”
Wong: Yes, I was invited by the San Francisco Museum Modern Art
gallery to be part of this
exhibition. And I make work and if people buy that’s wonderful. I
don’t make work to sell.
And when I received the invitation from the curator, she said,
“If you accept this invitation, you have to be willing to sell your
work.” And that was a challenge, because I do installations. I am in
a lot of collections, but that’s because people are just pleased by
what I make. And so I said, “Oh, ok.” And I spoke to my gallerist in
New York and she said, “Could you make something small? Your works
are all so big.” And so I said, “ok, what could I do that’s small
that people might want to buy and take away?” And so I had an
epiphany one day, it came to me at one in the morning—dolls. And
that’s really interesting because as I told you, I had an
impoverished childhood and I never had a doll in my life. I may have
had one—I seem to recall that somebody from the Salvation Army, which
was one or two blocks away from our restaurant, might have brought me
a doll one day, but I have a faint recall of that. But I don’t
remember dolls as part of my life. And so there I was, at the age of
70, playing with dolls.”
Interviewer: Angelika Piwowarczyk
Artist: Flo Oy
Wong
Phone interview Chicago, IL/ Sunnyvale, CA
Date: June
3, 2009 6:30 – 7:45pm CST