What’s the difference between a gargoyle and a grotesque? The answer coming up next on the
best art show in the DMV, Artico, art in your community. Chantal Wong was born in Shanghai
and raised in the Bay Area. Though her degrees were in engineering, she decided that what
needed some real fixing was Washington, D.C., and she’s been here for close to 30 years.
Wong has held many positions in the Clinton, Obama, and Bush administrations, but it wasn’t
until she retired that she found a new passion, photography, and she hasn’t looked back. It
became an obsession and then somehow became a profession. I actually get paid for doing
some of the work and I was very lucky to join John Lewis for four years to be his photographer
and videographer, thanks to an organization called the Faith and Politics Institute where they
bring members of Congress to civil rights sites in Alabama.

So it’s been an incredible experience for me just because I picked up a camera. It’s just a very
incredible opportunity and for me to be so close to this giant of a man, I would say that he was,
when he was alive, a living saint, if there was one. And to have that opportunity to not just be
next to him, but the people that he surrounded himself with, the civil rights icons.
So we would visit the 16th Street Baptist Church, for example. We would actually get
reenactments of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the four little girls that were killed on that
Sunday. And then we crossed the bridge with John Lewis.
And I remember we did that this last time, last March. He was weak. He was definitely not
himself.

He was very sick, but he got on the bridge and his voice was booming. He told us what we need
to do. He gave us that clarion call that we need to vote like we’ve never voted before.
It’s very emotional for me to have been there, to be part of history. And I remember that, you
know, months later, what he said about voting. I went to Georgia in January, in December,
actually.

You know, every piece of the election was important, but Asian Americans, we were part of the
margin of victory in Atlanta. And I also went out to Savannah and other parts of Georgia. After
we won, we flipped the two seats, both Ossoff and Warnock.
I went to visit John Lewis in his gravesite in Atlanta and told him that this one was for him, that
he told us we need to do. And we did. I think that picking up the camera really gave me the
inspiration to see the world in a very different light.

I’m still learning, definitely learning about light, lighting, and what the camera captures.
Sometimes it’s actually better than the naked eye. After I retired, I actually did a little bit of a
stint as a tech startup entrepreneur for a year and a half.
But basically, after that, I fully retired, and I started doing a lot of travel. My God, you know, that
is what, with a passport and a camera, I’m in my happy place to meet people. I love to talk to
people, to engage people, and then take photos of them.
So in my images, besides the beauty of the places, a lot of it is really engaging the people and
taking portraitures of the people that I get to meet. We got there for the sunrise. It was the
most serene, beautiful place on earth, the longest teak bridge in the world.

You know, I’m very active in the local community of the photographers in the community, so
I’m sitting on the board of an organization called Focus on the Story. And Focus on the Story is
about helping other photographers really be better storytellers. We’ve published a couple of
books.
One of them is to document the three days around the Trump inauguration. There was riots,
and there was intensity, and Antifa, and the Black Lives Matter. We were all capturing a lot of
that.

And then the next day was the Women’s March, where millions came to Washington. Very
pleased that my photo made the cover of that book. So that’s one of my proudest moments,
because we’re here in Washington to shine a light on critical issues, to bridge cultural divide,
and using visual imagery, whether it’s I think photography is, at least for me, that it has to have
a purpose, that it changes people’s lives.
Sonia Clark is a world-renowned mixed.