Anna Wong

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Anna Wong, “Tein Long #7 (Celestial Dragon),” 1967

lithograph on paper, A/P, 22” x 20” (collection of the Wong family)

The late Anna Wong, one of Vancouver’s most accomplished printmakers, is virtually unknown in the city. Born in 1930 and a top graduate in 1966 from the Vancouver School of Art, now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Wong won international awards and taught at a prestigious art school in New York City for almost two decades.

Her first retrospective, Traveller on Two Roads, aims to correct that oversight. The show, on view at the Burnaby Art Gallery until Nov. 3, features 70 works, including prints, paintings, drawings and textile pieces that speak to the collision of East and West, urban and rural, traditional and modern.

Wong grew up in Vancouver’s Chinatown in a large and prosperous family that founded Modernize Tailors, a longtime landmark that was the subject of a television documentary, Tailor Made: Chinatown’s Last Tailors. As a young woman, she worked in the shop and was exposed to the fabrics that influenced later works like Banner: “Pure Land in the Wood” Cave 217. The peak of Wong’s textile work included reams of fabric she silkscreened for large-format quilts made for her by the Amish community in Pennsylvania.

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Anna Wong, “Maple,” 1980

lithograph on paper, 2/20, 21” x 26” (collection of the Wong family)

The show’s earliest paintings were done when Wong lived in Hong Kong in 1957 and 1958, studying under Lingnan Art Studio founder Zhao Shao’ang, an important artist at the time. These early works, often details of the natural world, are within the Chinese tradition of ink brush painting, although Wong pushed the envelope with intense bursts of colour.

Her approach changed when she returned home and attended the Vancouver School of Art in the 1960s, studying with leading artists like Jack Shadbolt, Takao Tanabe and Roy Kiyooka. Her drawings became extremely abstract and some included built-up marks akin to the work of Ann Kipling, another of Wong’s teachers.

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Anna Wong at work in her Pratt studio in New York in 1971.

Wong received the Charles H. Scott Award and the Emily Carr Scholarship when she graduated and chose to continue her studies at the Pratt Graphic Art Centre, affiliated with the Pratt Institute in New York. Within a year, her skill at printmaking had earned her a teaching position. She continued to work there until the mid-1980s, when the centre was closed due to funding cuts.

Wong’s prints received several international prizes in the 1960s. She represented Canada in a number of print biennials, and her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery of China in Beijing in 1979.

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Anna Wong, “Eastside,” circa 1984

serigraph on paper, 20/20, 22” x 30” (collection of the Wong family)

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Anna Wong, “China Wall I,” 1981

serigraph on paper, A/P, 22” x 30” (from the Malaspina Printshop Archives of the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, gift of Milton and Fei Wong, BAG AN 1988.38.901 and 1988.38.902)

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After moving back to Vancouver in 1986, Wong continued to travel, especially to China. She formed a strong relationship with the Malaspina Printmakers Society on Granville Island and continued to make prints, as well as other work.

Until the end, Wong remained ambivalent about marketing her work in commercial galleries, although she was certain about the quality of her work. As she said in a 1988 interview: “I’m confident that whatever I sign now is of a certain calibre.”

Although her work varied, Wong wrote in an undated journal around 1990 that through it all she was trying to “elucidate ‘moments in time’ when one grasps intuitively the complexity and paradox of existence and nature. To push beyond the obvious, to investigate and attempt to understand that realm beyond the apparent is an adventure I find exciting and rewarding.”

She died in 2013.  ■

Anna Wong: Traveller on Two Roads is on view at the Burnaby Art Gallery from Aug. 31 to Nov. 3, 2018.