Tyrus Wong

Tyrus Wong had a rags-to-riches life and career. When he was nine years old, his mother, whom he never saw again, sent him to the United States. There he reunited with his father, who worked in Sacramento, and the pair later moved to Los Angeles, where they lived for several years in a community house for single men on Chinatown's Ferguson Alley. Wong's father encouraged his son to practice calligra­phy on old newspapers and helped him secure small painting commissions for neighborhood businessmen. A schoolteacher also recognized Wong's talent and recommended him for a summer scholarship at Otis Art Institute, where he became the youngest student ever to receive such an award. He eventually earned a full working scholarship, doing odd jobs around campus in lieu of paying tuition.^#

After graduating from Otis in 1930, Wong painted advertisements and worked at Chinatown's Dragon's Den restaurant, a popu­lar hangout for artists, until it closed under Depression-era financial duress. Wong found work with the Federal Arts Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration, painting oils and watercolors for a small monthly salary. As the Depression began to subside, Wong was hired as an artist for Disney, quickly rising to fame after he impressed Walt Disney with his preliminary pastel sketches for the film Bambi. He subsequently designed all of the backgrounds for the film, an immense creative undertaking for which he was honored with the title "Disney Legend" in 2001. In the aftermath of an animators' strike, Wong was forced to leave Disney before the release of Bambi in 1942, moving on to Warner Bros. (with intermittent work at Republic Studios), where he painted and sketched concept art for live-action classics such as Rebel Without a Cause, Around the World in 80 Days, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Wild Bunch. He retired in 1968.

In addition to working in Hollywood, Wong had a lively presence in Los Angeles galleries and museums and participated in several cooperative ventures, including Eleven Associ­ated, a gallery active in the early 1950s that showed primarily African American work. Often hailed for his watercolors and ceramics, Wong was influenced in part by his Otis mentor Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who encouraged his student's combination of traditional Chinese brushwork, taken from both calligraphy and landscape painting, and natural subjects in movement. Wong demonstrated these tech­niques in a short film made by Eliot O'Hara in 1954 for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He also successfully translated his fine art practice into best-selling Christmas card designs as well as dinnerware for Winfield Pottery that was subsequently mass-marketed in depart­ment stores across the United States.

Wong's life is the subject of a feature-length documentary, directed by Pamela Tom, titled Tyrus (2015). The film also brings to light the larger context of Chinese and Japanese artists working in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s, a topic first explored in depth by writer and independent curator Lisa See, whose 1995 book On Gold Mountain details many of Wong's exploits as a young artist in Chinatown.^#

Wong's work of the last few decades con­sists of intricately fashioned kites in the forms of dragons, birds, and myriad other animals. Having been an artist for the better part of a century, he demonstrated an inex­haustible commitment to creative expression.

 —Andrea Gyorody

Tyrus Wong: A Retrospective, Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles, 2003–4.

Mid-Century Mandarin: The Clay Canvases of Tyrus Wong, Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2004.

Kinetic Creatures: The Art Kites of Tyrus Wong, Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2004.

The Art of the Motion Picture Illustrator: William B. Major, Harold Michelson, and Tyrus Wong, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, 2007.