Continuing to February 1, 2026

Remember those TV game shows where shoppers are let loose in a supermarket to fill their cart with anything they can grab within a strict time limit? That’s what I think of when artists are granted access to museum storage to shape exhibitions combining their own work with what they discover. Such is the case with Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s “Ancestral Visions.” Unpredictably, what Wong has chosen from the collection are not signature treasures but old dresses from the historical archives. She notes that “I would love to continue working with archives, as I consider art and art history to be explicitly intertwined.”

This interest in cross-disciplinary practice is apt: “Ancestral Visions” occupies the same gallery that housed recent installations by two of Wong’s Bay Area contemporaries, Torreya Cummings and Mary Anne Kluth, both of whom also make multimedia works about history. In addition, the Oakland Museum received funding for her project from the foundation of the noted local artist, Ann Chamberlain, who in her short lifetime championed such work by women. 

Wong chose the qipao and cheongsam (close-fitting, satiny, embroidered gowns) donated by the families of six Chinese American women who lived here between the 1940s and the 1970s. The ten dresses Wong has selected are hung, wardrobe-style, in a Plexiglas case at the far-left corner of the three-walled, diorama-like gallery dedicated to artist projects.

Wong has installed five large paintings in a pastel-walled environment — including a brick red carpet — rinsed with pink, yellow, blue and purple neon light that she associates with Chinatown décor. The six women whose lives inspired Wong’s research are depicted in the dresses they wore at work, at home, or out about town. Each painting is inspired by clothing, ephemera, or photographs that are included in the display, as well as interviews with surviving family members.

Wong’s memories and the six women’s histories are transformed by imagination, perhaps even fantasy. The artist uses a flat, stylized painting style, so flat and shadowless that the figures could be stickers pasted on the canvas. Her work has an affinity thereby for such artists as Joan Brown, Chris Johanson and Maura Kalman, who variously use a sometimes cartoon-like figurative approach. It is a world in which everything is clean, all edges are crisp, and the colors are lovely but restrained. Perspective is casually rendered. We encounter mostly women and children in profile, rendered in a simplified, stripped-down approach. Everyone is smiling, children never walk but only run or skip. Eye contact happens only occasionally; there’s almost no touching. 

This is a recollected history that is visually seductive but antiseptic, dreamlike in its simplicity, arguing for an immigrant experience filled with a mutually supportive community. The figures’ various skin tones suggest a very inclusive, diverse and sweetly idealized population. The inference is that urban coteries of economically marginal people are largely forged around the centrality and sociability found while shopping in small neighborhood storefronts.

Wong employs horizontal rectangles atop each other to structure her canvases. In almost every case an abstract frieze of tile-like shapes forms the top boundary, and sometimes the sides, of the image. It suggests a theatrical stage’s border of curtains, reinforcing her dreamlike recapitulation of the past.

“Chasing Dreams” depicts three Grant Avenue storefronts (selling respectively fish, ceramics, and herbs) with smiling workers awaiting customers who stream by on the gray sidewalk taking up the bottom third of the painting. One of the stores is attended by a representation of its actual owner, Grace Dea, wearing the very dress seen hanging nearby.

Other works depict everyday goings-on, like a Mah Jongg game in “Here on Earth.” Wong has taught the tile game to help keep that tradition alive. In “Life’s Full Circle,” a restaurant scene depicts Rose Szeto both in the back as a dishwasher and in her dress, as a hostess, Wong playing here with time and space. “Unwavering Love” revisits the immediate postwar era when the Sunset District began to be built out and Asians were first permitted to buy real estate outside of Chinatown. Sand dunes are still seen outside the living room window. “Bending Light” takes us on a visit to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. Among Wong’s works here this one most closely approaches abstraction. Elements of exotic plants, visitors, water features and glass architecture intermingle in six horizontal tableaux, one atop the other. 

Wong, who is also a muralist, presents the enormous “Calling Home” in the courtyard outside the gallery. A Chinatown street scene with five buildings, Chinese street lamps, a large sun, birds, pedestrians and a string of red lanterns is juxtaposed against a dramatic black background. This site is awkward in that it is not inside the museum proper nor fully out on the street; in that sense it reiterates the contradictory nature of the immigrant experience, being present but not quite feeling at home. Political analysis aside, however, “Calling Home” represents the visual pleasure and vivacity afforded on a busy city street. Wong melds her subjects’ biographies with her own experience of the same community two generations later, a recapitulation by osmosis of the Asian American experience.