Kristina Wong in ‘The Wong Street Journal’ // All photos courtesy of REDCAT. Credit: Rafael Hernandez.
The work of performance artist Kristina Wong simultaneously tackles issues of social media obsession, globalization in conversation with personal narrative, anti-imperialist anti-racist travels to Uganda, and what happens when one self-declared Asian-American performance artist somehow becomes a Ugandan rap star. This all sounds promising and totally hilarious, but what went down wasn’t exactly triumphant. Wong’s sharp wit and intellect definitely left an impression on audiences, but ultimately the over-the-top nature of this humor at times went so hard so over-the-top that it just felt ironically grandiose. This show is as American as possible.
Wong begins by discussing the ways that she is not Apple, Google, the Wall Street Journal, or any other type of American global corporation. She seems slightly resentful about this, but it’s part of the critique. From there, Wong presents various charts on large-sized paper that are made of felt fabric, in a gesture of what real “handmade” products look like. All of the charts show her current interest in social media marketing, clickbait techniques that prey on your emotions, and how she spends way too much time in front of the computer basically yelling at herself for being unable to leave. Wong is trying to figure out how she can “leave her legacy” beyond just posting a lot to Facebook and Twitter, using many many hashtags, and making genuinely funny jokes about this.
She also discusses white privilege and the things that, as a third-generation Chinese-American, she gets questioned about all the time, which are lame to have to constantly deal with. Things like – “Where are you from originally?” which is the worst question ever to ask a person of color.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/924055-review-the-wong-street-journal#JSVWmhrGcQZzRf88.99
