SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.- Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce representation of San Francisco-based painter and muralist Chelsea Ryoko Wong. Inspired by Bay Area communities and landscapes, Wong’s distinct figurative style and use of warm, vibrant color celebrates a spectrum of lived experiences as a form of resistance and empowerment.
Wong recently held her first solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman, Gravitational Pull, in Spring 2022 and will present a series of four new, large-scale paintings in the gallery’s presentation for FOG Design+Art 2023.
“Wong’s paintings are rooted in a love for the Bay Area and its diverse communities. Including her in our international roster gives these personal narratives and poignant histories a new context,” said gallery owner, Jessica Silverman. “Wong’s deceptively simple lexicon is actually a subtle and sophisticated language of color, pattern and motif. Her paintings embody a vision of complex social harmony and well-grounded joy.”
Her work is largely inspired by her childhood growing up in a mixed cultural background in her hometown of Seattle. Since her time in the Bay Area—Wong lives and works in San Francisco’s historic Mission neighborhood—she has worked with a directness and accessibility attributable to the Mission School, evolving this aesthetic movement with inherently political subject matter.
Taking settings such as Chinese restaurants, fish markets, Californian shorelines, or National Parks, Wong populates her canvases with people of different backgrounds, genders, and ages enjoying various aspects of communal gathering. Similar to Bob Thompson’s works that celebrated jazz and the African American experience as a means to correct the exclusionary Western art canon, Wong is mindful to offer space to the cultures that have shaped and built the communities and places that she depicts.
Indeed, her works nod towards the Greek concept of eudaimonia, or a promotion of welfare and well-being, where social interrelation itself becomes a force of solidarity and transformation. New works on view for FOG Design+Art push this value forward, including the work Mussel Rock with Friends displaying friends collecting mussels from a rocky shoreline, or Learning How to Play Mah Jong where Chinese lanterns, a symbol of good fortune, hang above a group of four friends enjoying the traditional Chinese game.
Recently, Chelsea Ryoko Wong was announced as a finalist for the SFMOMA 2022 SECA Art Award. In July 2022, the de Young Museum acquired a piece by the artist that will be featured in an exhibition at the museum later this year.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist. She 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 esteemed SECA Art Award. She has completed large-scale mural projects in San Francisco at Asana; La Cocina; and through the Facebook Artist in Residence Program. Her work has been acquired by institutional and private collections including the de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
