Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: instagram.com/evrikwong
Evri Kwong was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area, the child of a family rooted in Chinatown whose immigration story runs directly through Angel Island. His name references the Everyman, a protest boat built and sailed from Sausalito in the early 1960s to oppose nuclear testing in the Pacific — an origin that signals a lifelong commitment to social conscience. He earned both his BFA and MFA in Drawing and Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and during graduate school received a full fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Kwong’s paintings address the histories that mainstream American culture tends to paper over: the Chinese railroad workers’ strike of 1867, the Page Act of 1875, the detentions at Angel Island, Japanese internment at Heart Mountain, and the racial violence woven through the twentieth century. His work draws directly on family memory — his grandmother was detained at Angel Island for six months; his grandfather endured FBI visits and anti-Chinese discrimination in 1950s America. “I am not a political artist,” he has said. “I am just an artist responding to the time we are living in.”
He is currently an adjunct professor of drawing and painting at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Asian American Art Centre in New York, Stanford University Hospital, and the Lannan Foundation. He has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant for Painting, and his work is cited in the Asian American Primary Source Reader (Yale Press, 2017).
Kwong’s signature approach places Sharpie permanent marker and Micron pen cross-hatching alongside blocks of bright, cartoonish acrylic painting in a grid structure that forces two visual registers into dialogue. The dense, Caravaggio-influenced chiaroscuro of the ink sections creates shadow and psychological weight; the pop-inflected painted sections carry an irony that cuts the opposite way. This juxtaposition is intentional: his compositions hold the idealized vision of America and its dark underside in the same frame, refusing to let viewers separate one from the other.
His materials extend beyond canvas to window shades and printing paper — surfaces chosen to make the work feel provisional, archival, and close to everyday life. The largest works span multiple panels, drawing viewers into accumulations of detail where each cross-hatched line becomes a meditation. Recurring subjects include labor exploitation, immigration detention, racialized violence, and the mechanisms by which American history erases its own record.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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