“This is my office,” Dean Wong told me, flopping down on the corner stool at the bar of Tai Tung restaurant, where the owner called out greetings, and where a sign on the wall proclaims it the oldest remaining Chinese restaurant in Seattle. Wong grew up in a storefront down the street.
We were meeting because I saw Wong’s photographs in two exhibitions and a new hardcover book called Seeing the Light: Four Decades in Chinatown.
If Chinatown is a character whose many identities unfold over a lifetime, Wong is their most devoted portraitist. He’s one of those artists driven by a singular subject.
“I have this immense curiosity for this place called Chinatown,” he told me. At 61, he acts the student, not the expert. He goes out to shoot every weekend.
I asked him to talk about his book and his exhibitions, and to share his streets and alleys, so we set out on two extensive walks this summer. He carried an iPad loaded with thousands of his pictures.
We hit the hardest places first. It has been a bad year.
