Yun Gee: Poetry, Writings, Art, Memories (review)

Yun Gee (1906-1963) was a Chinese American artist whose work was acclaimed in California in the 1920s but who later fell into obscurity, perhaps because, as Paul Karlstrom says in this book, "The last fifteen years of his life coincided with the rise and apotheosis of abstract expressionism in New York, and Gee's paintings, mainly figurative and often clinging to a socialist-realist aesthetic developed in the 1930s, did not attract the taste of dealers or the interest of critics" (p. 4). The book, published in conjunction with the exhibition The Art and Poetry of Yun Gee, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, from November 15, 2003, to February 15, 2004, is a collection of various writings focusing on Yun Gee. It includes seventeen colored plates of his paintings as well as some black-and-white illustrations , paintings that show influences from Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. Also appearing in print for the first time is a selection of his poetical works. The rest of the book consists of essays, by Yun Gee himself, by the editor of the book, and others, some reprinted, and memories of Yun Gee written by his daughter and niece in America. The series of which this publication is a part has as its aim the acknowledgment of the achievements of the ethnic minorities in the American visual arts, such as the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000 ), for whom the series is named.

Reading this book alongside the chapter on Yun Gee in Picturing Chinatown by Anthony W. Lee, who is also the editor of this book, one learns much more about the details of Yun Gee's life, but the account in the earlier book gives a more vivid picture of his most active and productive period.¹ Yun Gee was an avant-garde artist in the international style of painting who studied under Otis Oldfield at the California School of Fine Art, but he was also a pioneer Chinese artist, with his heart and mind set firmly on expressing himself as an artist in the international rather than the Chinese style, especially in his early and most successful years. He was an energetic and progressive youth, founding the Revolutionary Artists' Club in Wetmore Place in San Francisco to promote art among the inhabitants of Chinatown and taking part in movements in Chinatown to support revolutionary activities in China.

The present-day acceptance of Chinese artists abroad who paint entirely in the Western style makes us forget how difficult it once was for a Chinese artist to gain acceptance in the West, especially in the days of rampant racism against the Chinese in America. One thinks of the noted Chinese abstract painter Zao Wou-ki (born 1921) in Paris, active from the 1960s, and the hyperrealists of a later generation, Chan Kin-chung (born 1939) also in Paris and C. Y. Yao (born 1941) in New York, whose works are well known in Europe and America. Early in the twentieth century it was hard to forge a name in art if you came from Chinatown, because of its association with tatty exoticism and low social standing, perhaps more difficult than for a Chinese who had arrived directly from China. Not only had Yun Gee to break out of the mold destined for him in Chinatown, but he had to convince the world of his talent. Twice he left places where he had earned respect for his work, San Francisco and Paris, for reasons apparently to do with his vulnerability to racism; he eventually ended up in New York, which may have been more accepting in its racial attitude but where he never achieved the artistic heights that he had in earlier times.

Compared with Zao Wou-ki and the other Chinese painters abroad, Yun Gee was in many ways far more...