Sheldon Wong

Lives and works in Honolulu, HI

Artist statement

In a century, our bodies will be no more, but our archives may persist. The home gets all the glory, the walls invisible foundation. Inside, I learned how to desire. I learned how to dance. I learned and unlearned shame. I saw the walls reflect back a fractal soul and I mustered up the courage to cry. The body remembers what the mind neglects. A repeated gesture becomes a language of care, an articulation of touch as a labor of love. As a queer Asian-American, my work is interested in connecting my own diasporic histories within the land, within the home, within the body. Shaped by borders, migration, and the inheritance of shared experience; I am interested in interrogating the structures that determine which narratives are preserved, inserting myself as an active participant in mechanisms that safeguard my own history. I ask how we might listen more intently, how we might remember ourselves into wholeness. Beyond walls, beyond nation, beyond the lines we’ve drawn. Through gestural mark-making and a sculptural language of fragmentation, I can explore archives as living, ever-changing structures shaped by the ongoing extractions between the body, the land, and woven into our collective dreams.

Artwork