Frank Wong

Frank Wong (born September 22, 1932) is a San Francisco, California artist who creates miniature dioramas that depict the San Francisco Chinatown of Wong's youth during the 1930s and 1940s. His works include his grandmother's kitchen, the family's living room at Christmas, an herb shop, Chinese laundry, shoeshine stand, and life in a single room occupancy hotel common in Chinatown.

Methods

Wong constructs his dioramas around a single remembered object from his youth, such as an herb chopper, his grandmother's apron, or a sign on a laundry door. Wong creatively employs materials such as plastic tubing to make soup or chili cans, balsa wood to fashion tables, and toothpicks for siding. His dioramas are scaled one inch to one foot. a documentary about Wong and the "changing landscape of Chinatown" in San Francisco.

In 2016, the first screening of the nearly-completed documentary was shown at CAAMFest, a celebration of Asian American film, music and food, in San Francisco. The completed documentary aired on PBS in the USA

Personal

Wong lives near San Francisco's Tenderloin District. He never married and has no children.

Wong said Flower Drum Song, the musical set in San Francisco's Chinatown by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee, "was my life...That was me as a teenage kid".

Wong met Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth on the San Francisco set of the 1948 film noir production, The Lady from Shanghai.