The Los Angeles Times
1993-10-10
Leah Ollman
When photographer and installation artist Albert Chong was about 6 years old, his parents bought a new house in Kingston, Jamaica.
Chong’s father invited a Catholic priest to bless the house by sprinkling holy water throughout. A few days later, his father brought in another priest, this time a black Obeahman, or shaman, who sacrificed two roosters and scattered their blood not far from where the holy water had just dried.
“My father thought he should cover all his bases,” Chong recalls, laughing. “We were Catholics, really. But when things would start getting really bad and you’d see forces that were being worked against you that the regular, established Catholic religion couldn’t help you with—you couldn’t go to your local priest and say, hey, somebody has worked some wicked magic on me. Yet it’s a real thing.”
Like his father, Chong has a lot of bases to cover. His life gives new meaning to the overused term multicultural. Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean. He is married to Frances Charteris, an artist from England, and their two children, Ayinde and Chinwe, are, he says with pride and just a touch of resignation, very American…
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