“Frank Fat” 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, the
restauranteur Frank Fat’s apron, wok, and restaurant matchbooks.
Dong-Sai Fat was born in near Canton, China in 1904. He came
to the US in 1919, adopting his American name, Frank Fat. He
opened his namesake restaurant in 1939 in downtown Sacramento, near
the State capital. Known for quality food and service, the
restaurant soon became popular with state legislators and
lobbyists. In March of 2013, Frank Fat’s received the James
Beard Foundation America’s Classics Award— an honor bestowed upon
locally owned and operated restaurants that are the fabric of
their community.
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.