STEPHANIE HOO talks to Kristina Wong, whose play 'Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' looks at the high incidence of mental illness among Asian American women. A video report.
Carrying huge wheels of yarn as large as truck tires, performance artist Kristina Wong walks into the Purl yarn shop on a tree-lined street in downtown Manhattan ready to talk about art, politics, life and knitting.
She's here to use Purl's equipment, not shop. Yet, the floor-to-ceiling stacks of brightly colored yarn offer an outsized temptation for this knitting aficionado.
"I love yarn stores," she says.
"I've never done crystal meth, but I can imagine that the feeling a crystal meth addict has in a crack house is how I feel when I'm here right now," she adds with a wide grin. "It's just euphoric. You just want to touch everything."
Raucous and irreverent -- that's Wong in a nutshell. On this day, she is dividing her wheels of yarn into smaller balls to give out to audience members at her one-woman show "Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which looks at the high incidence of mental illness among Asian American women.
It is showing June 16-18 in New York as part of the first ever National Asian American Theater Festival.
The festival features more than 25 Asian-American theater companies and performance artists at venues around the city. It runs through June 24.
Yet, even non-New Yorkers can keep up with Wong, who also posts videos on YouTube, social networks on MySpace and keeps a crackling blog on her own site -- all in a day's work for an artist in our multimedia times.
See the video here.
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Stephanie Hoo is an asap reporter based in New York.
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