About
Artist/poet/educator FLO OY WONG was born and raised in Oakland Chinatown. She began her art career at the age of forty and her poetry career at the age of 75. A recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Awards (NEA), she made art and wrote poetry to tell stories about her immigrant family and other Asian communities.
In 1989, she co-founded the San Francisco-based Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) and was the first Asian American woman appointed to the board of the National Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). Her work has been exhibited widely including the Euphrat Museum, Oakland Museum, de Young Museum, the Smithsonian, Angel Island Immigration Station, Ellis Island, and in New York at the Flomenhaft Gallery. She has been featured in KQED’s SPARK program and Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Writings about her work have been published in many publications. Contemporary Asian Theater Scene (CATS) presented Flo with their 2022 Image Hero Award.
In 2018, she published Dreaming of Glistening Pomelos (Amazon), her first art poetry book. Currently, a member of The Last Hoisan Poets, she reads her poetry in Hoisan-wa and in English with her sister, Nellie Wong and Genny Lim at the de Young Museum and other venues. Still active in several poetry groups, she writes poetry almost daily.