“I think the whole body should be a jewel, radiating beauty.” This was artist-designer Kaisik Wong’s philosophy of clothing—and being. Wong (1950–1990) approached the making and wearing of clothing as a process of attunement to the world. He listened to fabric as it told him how it wished to be shaped and draped. He meditated as he sewed. The finished garments transformed their wearers, extending their inner radiance outward, connecting them to the earth. Donning Wong’s glittering rainbow, model Merle Bulatao blossoms like the flowers that surround her in a late summer field. Like them, she drinks the sun.

Kaisik Wong was born in San Francisco Chinatown on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, in the Year of the Tiger. Often described as a fashion designer, Wong’s creations also included theatrical costumes, window displays, runway shows, photo shoots, parade floats, and performances. I spent my two-month appointment at the Center drafting a chapter on Wong for my book project, “Making San Francisco Chinatown,” the first book-length account of the artists and makers who lived and worked in that neighborhood. After its destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire, Chinatown was rebuilt with decorative flourishes evoking the Orientalist fantasy of “China” as an aesthetic to be experienced, a place to be visited, an object to be consumed. But Chinatown is far more than its spectacular skin; it is a vibrant community that has nurtured generations of artists and continues to do so into the present. These artists were connoisseurs, theorists, and creators of the neighborhood’s material and visual culture. They worked with, through, and beyond blunt binaries (fake/real, inauthentic/authentic, assimilation/resistance, West/East) that define outsider accounts of the neighborhood. Rather than “recovering” these artists to include them in a canon, nation, or discourse, “Making San Francisco Chinatown” explores the forms of accommodation, creativity, and refusal engendered by living in a built environment shaped by American Orientalism. My work draws on community, family, and private archives as well as oral history interviews, and is grounded in collaboration with members of the Chinatown community. These collaborations include work with organizations such as the Chinatown Culture Center of San Francisco and Chinese Historical Society of America. I also serve on San Francisco’s advisory committee for the renovation of Portsmouth Square and on the board of the Martin Wong Foundation.

Alongside chapters on painters Bernice Bing (1936–1998), Martin Wong (1946–1999), and photographer Irene Poon (b. 1941), the chapter on Kaisik Wong forms the third part of the book. Titled “In the Streets,” this section explores the artists’ relationships with the activist and countercultural movements of 1960s and ’70s San Francisco, including the Third World Liberation Front, citywide anti-eviction protests, and queer anarchist communes that grew out of the Summer of Love. The chapter traces Kaisik Wong’s trajectory from his artistic formation in San Francisco Chinatown, through his collaboration with queer mystic Steven Arnold, his fashion design training in New York City, and his eventual return to San Francisco in the early 1970s. Wong’s meticulously crafted pastiches of ethnic sources were informed by the glamour of mid-century Chinatown as well as the countercultural interest in “Asian” spirituality as an alternative to Euro-American rationality. His practice reveals the way that counterculture Orientalism was transformed by diasporic artists as a means of forging connections to their imagined ancestral traditions.

While in DC, I also conducted research in the Jade Snow Wong Papers at the Library of Congress and AAPI collections at Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Living in the District also yielded a reflection on cherry trees, the National Mall, the US semiquincentennial, and ICE, forthcoming this summer in October.

Stanford University
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, January–February 2026

Marci Kwon will return to her position as associate professor and Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Scholar in the Humanities at Stanford University.