Jessica Silverman
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Chelsea Ryoko Wong: Swimming in the Pool of Memory

Chelsea Ryoko Wong: Swimming in the Pool of Memory

October 28-December 19, 2026

Jessica Silverman presents Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from October 28 to December 19, 2026. Titled “Swimming in the Pool of Memory,” the exhibition features 12 new watercolors inspired by the ancient Greek goddess of memory with whom Wong became captivated after a residency on the island of Rhodes. Born in the USA to Japanese-American and Chinese parents, Wong is known for her colorful depictions of diverse people in social harmony. Her paintings are at once playful and thoughtful, intimate and universal, heartfelt and coolly composed. With this new body of work, Wong turns her attention inward, exploring the past’s perpetual presence in our minds’ eye.

The works in “Swimming in the Pool of Memory” focus on moments of complete absorption. In a culture organized around distraction, Wong presents a case for undivided attention. Her scenes depict experiences screens cannot replicate: a live concert, a campfire gathering, an afternoon by the water, or the coupled gazes that convey love. Drawing on fact and fantasy, personal memory and Greek mythology, Wong sees each painting as an invitation to stop, step into her world, and reflect.

INSTALLATION VIEW
SELECTED WORKS
ARTIST BIO
OTHER EXHIBITIONS

INSTALLATION VIEW

SELECTED WORKS

Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Anywhere With You, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Anywhere With You
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Ephēmeros, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Ephēmeros
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Off to Eames, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Off to Eames
The show’s title invokes Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the nine muses. In the myth, souls entering the underworld are warned to avoid the river Lethe, whose waters erase all memory, and to drink instead from the pool of remembrance. “This body of work is about retrospection in both content and form,” explains Wong. “Your mind folds the past into the present and lives with it. Similarly, watercolor has memory. You can’t make mistakes. It forgives nothing. There is no erasing, only moving forward.”
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Life's Pleasures, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Life's Pleasures
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
As Close to Heaven, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, As Close to Heaven
The show moves through time the way memory does. Wong appears in these works at different ages – as a young girl running along the edge of a lake and as an adult leisurely enjoying a boat ride. What first reads as a simple, sunlit scene reveals itself in layers: the glances and gestures between figures, the relationships within a crowd, the careful spacing that holds it all in balance. “The longer people spend with my work, the more they can parse out,” Wong says. While Wong’s self-portraits face out, other characters appear in profile and are rarely individualized. “People who look nothing like my figures have found themselves in the crowd,” she says. “That thrills me. I want everyone – people of every walk of life – to imagine themselves in the worlds I build.”
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
If I Could Stop Time, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
29 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches / 74.9 x 110.5 x 4.4 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, If I Could Stop Time
Wong’s sources span continents and centuries. Originally trained as a printmaker, she builds her pictures from flat layers of color and stylized patterns, a style she shares with Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock prints whose name means “pictures of the floating world.” Her use of color follows Josef Albers’s lessons in color interaction: hues that should clash are set side by side until they vibrate into harmony. Her attention to light comes from the Impressionists. In an unusual composition titled If I Could Stop Time (2026), Wong renders a pond full of water lilies surrounded by willow trees that recalls Monet’s pond at Giverny, painted not in the style of his broken brushwork but in the ombre and planar language of the Japanese prints that Monet collected. Her deliberately flattened figures place her in a lineage of artists who turned stylistic naivety into a sophisticated language, from Henri Rousseau to Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Seeking Enlightenment, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
23 1/2 x 29 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 59.7 x 74.3 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Seeking Enlightenment
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
In the Pool of Memory, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
23 1/2 x 29 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 59.7 x 74.3 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, In the Pool of Memory
Wong’s pictures feel fresh and honest; they have an ease that betrays the discipline of an artist at the height of her craft. In Seeking Enlightenment (2026), for example, Wong depicts a tea ceremony with two windows that could be paintings. Paying homage to the architecture of Kyoto’s famed Genko-An Temple, the circular window symbolizes enlightenment while the square window stands for confusion. Here the non-traditional meets the faintly comic: a rite designed for stillness accommodates a business meeting and a woman invades others’ space, stretched out along the floor. Wong introduces a touch of disorder into perfection; it’s life, and it’s okay.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Bridge Between Worlds, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
23 1/2 x 29 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 59.7 x 74.3 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Bridge Between Worlds
Bridge Between Worlds (2026) widens the frame from a single afternoon to the span of a life. Salmon return to the river where they were born, a homecoming guided by memory. The scene merges the Washington coast of Wong’s upbringing with the Marin Headlands near her current home. “The salmon are ephemeral, the sunset is ephemeral, and so are we,” Wong says. Wong positions the fleeting focus of people of all ages – a young mother engaging her children’s attention and a gray-haired man peering through binoculars – against the enduring mountains and endless flow of the ocean.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Under the Moonlight, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Under the Moonlight
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Feeling Uninhibited, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Feeling Uninhibited
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Strum in My Soul, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Strum in My Soul
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Under the Moonlight, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Under the Moonlight
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Feeling Uninhibited, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Feeling Uninhibited
Chelsea Ryoko Wong
Strum in My Soul, 2026
Watercolor and gouache on paper
21 1/4 x 19 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches / 54 x 48.9 x 3.8 cm

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Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Strum in My Soul
In Strum in My Soul (2026), a conductor unites singers and musicians with a rapt audience, visually conveyed through three tiers of people, which are held in balance without crowding. A representation of the live, interactive power of cooperative focus, the work also celebrates the joy of collective appreciation, as separate listeners become one audience, absorbed in an experience they will carry with them long after the music ends.

While Wong paints, she likes to imagine that her work will be unearthed sometime in the future, like a newly discovered cave painting. “This series is about what it means to be joyfully alive now,” Wong says. From ponds to rivers, bays, and oceans, water runs through the works in the exhibition. Each is a pool of memory. While some souls may be tempted to forget, Wong chooses to remember.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong (b. 1986, Seattle, WA) attended Parsons School of Design, New York and received her BFA in printmaking from California College of the Arts. Wong is an artist-in-residence at The Eames Institute in Petaluma, CA through October 2026. In 2024, she was awarded the Harker Fund Residency at Oakland Museum of California and solo exhibition, “Ancestral Visions” in 2025. She will be included in a group show at Bolinas Art Museum in January 2027, and has participated in recent group exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Blunk Space, Point Reyes, CA; Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA; and Bolinas Museum, CA. She has been commissioned for numerous large-scale projects and murals including at SFMOMA and Asian Art Museum. Her work has been acquired by institutional and private collections including SFMOMA, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Oakland Museum of California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and Bolinas Museum, CA. Her third solo show with the gallery opens October 28, 2026. Wong lives and works in the Mission District of San Francisco.
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