“Bill King, Flying Tiger” scroll for
Gold Mountain, an
installation by artist Flo Oy Wong displayed at
“Whispers
of the Past,” an art exhibition held from January 20 - March 24,
2007 at the Forty Acres Art Gallery in Sacramento, CA. The
installation included a collaged scroll of family photos, Bill King’s
flight jacket and flight suit.
Bill King (1916 -2002), a third generation American-born
Chinese, volunteered to fly for the Chinese Air Force in World War
II and was assigned to the Chinese American Composite Wing (CACW) of
the 14th Air Force. He was a highly decorated Flying Tiger
pilot.
In her essay,
On
Voice and Memory: Flo Oy Wong, art historian Dr. Melanie
Herzog writes “In Whispers of the Past, four installations Wong
created in 2007, previously untold stories are revealed in visual
form and accompanying text—like whispered, fragmentary memories
buried and exposed over time. Wong sought to uncover the stories of
key Chinese individuals in Sacramento and the Delta region of
central California. Deeply honored to hear these stories, told to
her by relatives of her subjects, Wong describes their reclamation
as a process of “collaborative retrieval” in which these unspoken
narratives poured forth “like a waterfall that has been sequestered
in a teeny, tiny faucet.”
Photo from the archives of artist Flo Oy Wong.