Continuing through October 11, 2025
Holly Wong, a native Floridian who has lived in San Francisco since 1989, and is, incidentally, married to the experimental filmmaker Al Wong, has seen her career blossom in recent years. Composed and articulate, she discusses her troubled family background of violence and probable drug use (her bedroom was once riddled with bullet holes meant for her father) with a calm acceptance. She even embraces the traumas that once caused her to suffer flashbacks, memory lapses, and anorexia as creative engines that now motivate her prolific production. It’s all carried out in her Sunset District stucco home, much of it laid out in fragments and finalized on her living-room carpet.
Her artistic odyssey, to return again to mythology, began as a young painter enamored of the powerful expressionism of Soutine, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Then came her installation and performance work at SFAI (where she worked as a janitor). Finally, she arrived at her breakthrough textile and installation works, inspired by her mother, a seamstress who taught her to sew before her rape at knifepoint by a supposed family friend in her own home. That tragedy inspired the artist-daughter’s refusal to be invisible and therefore complicit. Wong’s creative journey from 1988 to the present is detailed in her new monograph, edited by Elizabeth Wiet, “Mending Body/Mending Mind.”
The acerbic art critic Robert Hughes once remarked of antiwar art (or political art in general), that no painting ever saved anyone’s life. The makes a great aphorism, but even Hughes, taking a longer view, in another context, would have qualified his dismissive judgment. I would counter, on behalf of many of us chosen by the arts, that art does save lives, providing an infinitely compelling window on the world and an arena in which to act.
Wong celebrates art’s power to heal and unite in these immersive textile installations and hypnotically complex collages. Combining power and beauty is in the artist’s wheelhouse: it’s abstraction in the service of humanism.
That mythological bird, when aged, builds a bonfire, immolates itself, then rises, reborn, from the ashes; hope is “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson writes. Wong’s phoenix is composed of graphite drawings on mylar pieces that were stitched together, forming an eleven-foot tall/wide free-form work suspended mid-air by monofilament. Tapered forms covered with both organic (bubbles, droplets, tendrils) and geometric patterns (grids, nets, pixels) swirl like tongues of flame or feathers borne aloft by heat. The bird and the bonfire merge into a baroque-abstract symbol of destruction, purification, and renewal.
In a gallery talk, Wong equated the current show’s title with her “journey toward wholeness” derived from her personal trauma and injury. Some of Wong’s imagery derives from medical photos of wounds, “beautiful scars” which are not readily discernible. Her editor Wiet likens Wong’s cutting and sewing to acts of violence that are redeemed by art.
“Full Circle” brings together Wong’s mixed-media sculptures into smaller, wall-mounted siblings of the car-sized vortex of “Phoenix.” These organic painted/printed collages are flat two-dimensional images that contain, in Wong’s words “worlds within worlds,” in the tradition of the Surrealist visionary micro-macrocosmic landscapes of Roberto Matta, among others.
Also featured are four large wall-hung works whose assembled pictorial elements protrude into the gallery space, evoking Frank Stella’s relief paintings of the 1980s. “Quilt Suspension 1” (2022) is a conical assemblage of silk, cotton and organza fragments that the artist has differentiated with varying marks: boxes and grids, and possibly some photo imagery, either painted or printed. The vortex form relates to the earlier “Phoenix,“ as well as to the plants and floral bouquets used in funeral ceremonies, which Wong has studied.
In contrast to this effusive handmade patchwork is what appears to be a spontaneously drawn form, expected in light emitting diodes, a metaphor for life energy and spiritual force. “Thalassa” (2025), Greek for ‘the sea,’ is a wall piece composed of biomorphic shapes cut from acrylic, decorated with curvilinear patterns executed in colored pencil, perhaps depicting the sparkling vivacity of the open water on a glorious day — certainly not Homer’s “wine dark sea.”
The two “Mnemosyne Rising” (2025) pieces are aqueous ameba-shaped collages on Dibond. The title refers to the Greek goddess of memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus, and mother of the nine Muses, often invoked by the bards to help them remember and recite their epics. Mnemosyne was also, in Orphism, the name of the river of memory from which dead souls were instructed to drink, so as to stop their transmigration back into the world. Wong’s biomorphic “Mnemosyne” collages are immersive but they are also complex and ambiguous. Using oil paint and candle smoke, they suggest impressions of sensory memories only dimly or imperfectly recollected. The images are like the details of a dream in which the impressions of strangeness and preternatural meaning persist.
The numbered “Lethe’s Garden” series refers to the Greek underworld’s river of forgetfulness, which eases memories of past lives for the newly reborn. Wong sees Lethe as at least partially necessary for the healing process to take place. The series’ small to medium-sized framed works, combining drawing in graphite, colored pencil, alcohol-based ink with gouache paint and collaged fabric on wooden panel, are miniature versions of the “Mnemosyne” pieces, visionary abstract depictions of the world in all its complexity and contradiction, like the bas-relief world depicted on the bronze shield Achilles, a god’s-eye view of human life in war and peace, birth and death.
