"Kwong's ambitious multi-panel work depicts moments from his grandparents' immigration experience, showing them coming off the boat, passing through the processing center, and enduring interrogation in small rooms. The figures are deliberately faceless, their bulbous heads rendering them as everymen whose physical actions tell the story. "Painting is my meditation," Kwong says. When he is making the artwork, it becomes a total meditation responding to mark-making, shape, form, and color."
"Learning what his grandparents endured at Angel Island, and discovering that his Japanese uncle had been interned at Heart Mountain during World War II, hit him hard. Rather than looking away, Kwong decided it was time to investigate these painful histories through his art. "It's not like a finger pointing or blaming, but just really trying to understand history, how my family got here, how they came here, what happened to them," he explains."
Evri Kwong creates multi-panel drawings that depict the Angel Island detention center where his Chinese grandparents were interrogated after arriving in America. He uses dense cross-hatching to build shadowy rooms and anxious, deliberately faceless figures whose bulbous heads render them as everymen. The project grew from genealogical conversations and discoveries about family internment at Heart Mountain during World War II. Kwong chooses Sharpie markers and Micron pens to combine painting and drawing with permanence and precision, preferring them over charcoal. He draws on chiaroscuro influences to shape light and shadow, and treats painting as a meditative practice while teaching and working in a San Rafael library.
Read at ABC7 Los Angeles
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