Anna Wong

Life and career Wong was born in 1930 and raised in the Chinatown district of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He began Modernize Tailors, which became a successful business in Chinatown, and was continually run by the Wong family until 2017.

As a young adult, she often acted as a caretaker for her younger siblings and relatives, especially when her parents left for a round-world trip in 1951. She devised classes for her siblings in subjects such as sewing, cooking and art, which became known as "Anna's School". Within a year, she was hired by director Andrew Stasik as a Professor in Studio Arts at the Pratt Graphics Centre. She returned to Vancouver every summer and ran a printing workshop in Burnaby Art Centre in 1971 with Stasik, and taught at the VSA and Malaspina Printmakers. Beginning in 1978, Wong also began taking trips to China after the country reopened to the West. She photographed landmarks including the Great Wall and Buddhist caves such as at Dunhuang or Lungmen, but also scenes of daily life, which became part of a new series of prints based on her travels. Wong continued teaching at the Pratt Graphics Centre until it closed in 1986. Afterwards, she returned to Vancouver and continued her art practice, sharing time between her Vancouver studio and Quadra Island studio, which she had set up in 1984. the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (1980), the Royal Ontario Museum (1986), the Richmond Art Gallery (1987), and Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, among others.

She was included in notable group exhibitions such as Contemporary Canadian Prints: A Survey, alongside works by Gordon Smith, John Esler, Toni Onley, Margot Lovejoy, Richard Lacroix, and others, at the Pratt Graphics Centre; as well as Canadian Contemporary Printmakers at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1982). In 1982, her work was included in China Today, an exhibition at the Floating Foundation of Photography in New York City.

In 1984, her work represented Canada at the Republic of China International Print Exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan. The Vancouver exhibition and research project Chinatown Modern (2002), curated by Steven Tong at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, included Anna Wong, and addressed the "lack of public recognition of Asian Canadian artists who emerged in Vancouver during the 1960s and 1970s." Wong's work was included in the exhibition The Ornament of a House: Fifty Years of Collecting, at the Burnaby Art Gallery in 2017.

The Burnaby Art Gallery hosted Wong's retrospective exhibition Anna Wong: Traveller on Two Roads in 2018. The exhibition received an Award of Outstanding Achievement in Exhibitions from the Canadian Museums Association in 2019, toured to the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke in 2020, and the Nanaimo Art Gallery in 2021. The exhibition was accompanied by a full-colour publication of the same title in two bilingual editions (English/French/Chinese), with an introduction from curators Jennifer Cane and Ellen vanEijnsbergen, and essays from Keith Wallace and Zoë Chan.

Art style Wong's work has been noted for its dense layering, break from traditional printmaking processes and hybridity of themes and techniques. Her Hong Kong era brush paintings have been described as "rendering precise, fine lines and soft washes of colour...[adhering] to the nature-based repertoire of imagery conventionally found in Chinese brush painting." Her prints based on her travels to China further incorporated multiple printmaking techniques while also adding other mixed media elements such as ribbon, silk, paper and ink stamps. Her quilts incorporated the techniques and subject matter of her previous works, such as plants and text, which were printed directly onto fabric. She then had them sewn together by an Amish community in Pennsylvania.

1987, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, Canada

1984, Republic of China International Print Exhibition, Taipei City Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan

1982, Canadian Contemporary Printmakers, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA

1967, Joy and Celebration, UBC Fine Arts Gallery (now Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery), Vancouver, Canada

1966, Two Exhibitions: British Columbia Watercolours, Prints and Drawings, UBC Fine Arts Gallery (now Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery), Vancouver, Canada

Richmond Art Gallery, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Guelph.