Chelsea Wong

In my family sharing food and feeding one another represents love. My father grew up in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation in a time of food scarcity. Growing up we heard the stories of each child getting one egg for their birthday and savoring it all day long by eating it with a toothpick. Or picking a piece of a chicken according to age with the youngest always getting the least favored pieces. These days, it’s no wonder our family activities revolve around meals, the planning, consuming, and critiquing of them. When I was in college and came home during holidays, my dad would always have a roast duck over rice waiting for me. – Chelsea Ryoko Wong

Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist. Inspired by the multifaceted communities and landscapes of California, Wong’s layered compositions celebrate the joy of communal existence. The subject matter of each painting is derived from the artist’s memory. She collects moments of joy and lays them down with paint: a family gathering for dim sum, an intergenerational lesson of mah jong, a couple enjoying onsen. Her figures are playful, strong, and self-possessed, representing a collective of racial and cultural identities that defy political turbulence. 

Wong attended Parsons School of Design, New York and received her BFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts. She is the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley and was a 2022 finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award. She has completed large-scale mural projects in San Francisco at Asana; La Cocina; and the Facebook Artist in Residence Program. Her work has been acquired by institutional and private collections including the de Young Museum, San Francisco and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Her work is currently featured in the exhibition Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.