MARINA PEREZ-WONG: Whenever we're on a mural,
everything comes very naturally.
We flow together and
ELAINE CHU: Bounce ideas off of one another,
and we both have our strengths.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: I have one half of a brain when I'm
on a wall, but I need my twinsie there too.
ELAINE CHU: Same.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: Because we can do it
without each other.
It's fine.
It's just not as much fun.
ELAINE CHU: It's not as much fun.
We're Twin Walls Mural Company.
We've been focusing on manifesting what we paint.
What do we want to see in the world?
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: The main themes are health
and growth.
We started with the sakura tree.
It has to deal with lungs, so the idea,
you know, stemming from COVID, of course, people
not being able to breathe.
All of the things with George Floyd had just happened
and we kept seeing this, "I can't breathe."
We wanted to counter that.
Like, how do we make sure that all of our people
can breathe and breathe really healthily.
ELAINE CHU: Cherry blossoms, like flying out
from the tree, which also is lungs.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: Spreading.
Spreading seeds.
ELAINE CHU: Spreading seeds and hope.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: We will have seven young women, four
from the Radical Monarchs
and three students of Oakland School for the Arts.
We wanted young women of color who are making
serious moves towards the actions
that we want to see in the world.
ELAINE CHU: And they're also going to be dancing
on water.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: We were thinking about colonizer
ships that came over.
And just thinking about burying them, like how would
we like sink their battleships, in a sense,
before they could even get to us.
ELAINE CHU: We we're inspired by all the monuments being
torn down and thrown into lakes and just dismantling
that patriarchy, the system, all the things that
are happening in our current world.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: The border,
especially, because there's so many kids in cages right
now, it's important for us
to dream that that is sunken in the ground.
It's no longer.
And that these girls are thriving and dancing
on top of it.
All of it, like with the awareness that it's there,
but they've grown from it.
They're bigger.
ELAINE CHU: Right, they're not just surviving.
They're thriving.
From what their ancestors had to go through,
they are their ancestors wildest dreams.
Community is really important to us
because we come from a really strong community
of artists, of women artists.
We feel really honored to be given this platform
to paint what we want to paint here
in the museum on such a monumental scale.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: We're, you know,
kind of an infiltration of the system, too.
So we always love doing that.
We can't help ourselves.
ELAINE CHU: While bringing our community
into an institution.
MARINA PEREZ-WONG: You wouldn't normally
see little brown girls painted six feet tall on a mural
in the museum.
It's transformative to be standing in front of a mural
and see those scenes reflected, the colors reflected,
a channel something inside.
So, for the viewer, for us, for, well, the women
we work with also.