Flo Oy Wong: Angel Island, Immigration and Family Stories at the Japanese American National Museum

We began our project to catalog Flo’s artwork on Friday, August 21, 2026. Ed helped to orient us to Flo’s files and gave us a quick overview of where we might find art and other documents of interest. In the coming months, we will be taking a deep dive into Flo’s expansive body of work, created from the time that she started her art lessons in 1976, at the age of 38, to her death at the age of 87 in 2026.

In the garage, we spied a box labeled “Angel Island.” This seemed like a good place to begin the treasure hunt, so we brought the box home.

Inside, we found a tote bag filled with saved rice sacks, manila envelopes, file folders and notecards. One intriguing cardboard sleeve tightly sealed up on all four edges with packing tape caught our attention. Opening this package up, we found three discs inside – one with the identifying insert:

FLO OY WONG
Angel Island Immigration and Family Stories
September 27, 2001 – March 31, 2002
Japanese American National Museum 

We keep a watchful lookout for CDs and DVDs that date back more then 20 years. Sadly, we have lost many a file with the passage of time and the limited lifespan for digital media.

We got lucky (thanks to IsoBuster data recovery software). While two of the discs were damaged beyond retrieval (heat speeds the degradation of digital media), the disc in the plastic case held an amazing wealth of material pertaining to Flo Oy Wong: Angel Island, Immigration and Family Stories at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) — We recovered information about exhibit design, signage, printed materials, correspondence and photographs.

The signage for the 2001 exhibition was created using QuarkXPress, a desktop publishing program that was once the industry standard, before Adobe’s InDesign arrived on the scene in 1999. These files were opened, converted and printed to pdf booklet format for archival purposes.

Above: Text panels for Flo Oy Wong: Angel Island, Immigration and Family Stories at JANM (2001)

How moving to see that the signage for the JANM exhibition incorporated the portraits of the people whose stories and secrets – enabling viewers to connect the faces to Flo’s rice sack flags.

“I was really struck by the idea of Flo as an artist being a catalyst within her community,” says Kristine Kim, the museum’s associate curator and organizer of the show, “getting people to open up and talk about things that had been hidden and shameful.”

Cheng, S. (2001, September 30). Seeking Out History’s Hidden Secrets. Los Angeles Times.

To read the invitation “as it went out” in 2001 is to remember that Flo’s art invites us to examine the difficult questions of our times – in the past, in the present – for the future.