“The Family’s New year’s Eve”, Stephanie Yu, Third Grade, Age 8
Hacienda Heights, CA Wedgeworth Elementary School
Art Teacher: Tom Lein

Celebrate! Chinese Holidays Through the Eyes of Children

The Chinese American Museum and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA), a pioneering national civil rights organization, present Celebrate! Chinese Holidays Through the Eyes of Children—an exhibit of original artworks about Chinese festivals and celebrations made by school children across the United States. Ten years after the CACA’s original 1995 National Art Competition, these vibrant winning images are brought together again in Celebrate! to signal the exciting return of this nation-wide art contest in 2007, a joint project between CAM and the CACA.
November 5, 2006- April 8, 2007

The official Fez of Los Angeles Lodge, the second Lodge to be established in the Alliance in the 1930s.

Chinese American Citizens Alliance

The Chinese American Citizens Alliance is a national organization whose purpose has been for more than a century to advocate for the rights and promote the well being of the Chinese American community. A group of young men, born in America of Chinese ancestry, formed the Alliance in San Francisco, California in 1895 to fight discriminatory laws fueled by wide spread anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 19th Century. Since its inception, the Alliance has generated a broad range of political, social and cultural activities based on its abiding commitment to the Chinese American community. Youth programs focusing on civic duty, community awareness, and cultural pride have been a large part of the Alliance's repertoire of community-wide activities. On display in this new exhibit are objects ranging from artifacts to historic collateral materials provided by the various Alliance Lodges located throughout the Unites States.
November 5, 2006- April 8, 2007

The Meeting, 1998, acrylic, 24” x 30”

Merging: The Art of Diana Shui-Iu Wong

Merging features a collection of work that spans four decades, from Wong’s early impressionistic portraits and landscapes to recent abstract compositions inspired by the Chinese philosophy of the I Ching or The Book of Changes.

While Wong’s classical training in both Chinese and Western painting form the basis for her techniques, her study of the I-Ching offered her a decisive break from traditional modes as well as new creative directions. In 1962, Wong began to experiment beyond the conventions of her formal art training to explore the liberating complexity of abstraction. Discovering that she could express pride for her heritage and culture through her work, Wong has also found self- empowerment through her art making. Wong’s most recent work ventures boldly into abstraction while grounded in nature and the elements. Her striking images, like color-flooded snapshots of the cosmos, explore universal questions about being and balance.
March 18, 2006 – October 15, 2006

Milton Quon, Trainyard, Los Angeles, 1983, watercolor on paper, courtesy of the artist. 11 3/8" x 14 3/8".

Impressions: Milton Quon’s Los Angeles
The Chinese American Museum is proud to present its next major art exhibit featuring the work of Chinese American artist Milton Quon, opening May 15, 2005. This retrospective exhibit will showcase the broad range of the artist’s practice from fine art to commercial work, much of which is on public display for the first time.

Milton Quon is a native of Los Angeles, born in 1913. He is the eldest of eight children and the only son of the Ng Quan Ying family. After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), Quon began his professional career with Walt Disney Studios in 1939, helping animate the films Fantasia and Dumbo. He returned to Disney after the war, joining the Publicity/Promotions Department, doing promotional art on projects and films, including Make Mine Music and Song of the South. Following his tenure at Disney, Quon built a long and successful career as a commercial artist, first as an art director for the ad agency BBD&O, and later at the packaging firm Sealright Co., Inc. Quon also shared his creative talent as an instructor at Los Angeles Trade Tech College.

From whimsical cherubs in Disney’s Fantasia to bold advertising posters, Quon’s commercial work will be presented alongside the artist’s rich collection of fine art works. Quon’s plein-air watercolors chronicle everyday life against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s diverse scenery in a changing natural and urban landscape, from a pre-Dodger’s Stadium Chavez Ravine Grocery store and New Chinatown Gateway to the Santa Monica Beach Pier. With rich, intuitive colors and expressive lines, Quon captures in watercolor the vibrant energy of our sun-kissed beaches, the dreary structures of industrial refineries and the crowded train yards converging at the heart of Los Angeles. As a tireless artist, fishing enthusiast and avid traveler, Quon is always armed with a sketchbook, pens and watercolors, recording subjects of local interest as well as his travels across the country and abroad. Finally, the exhibit will also feature Quon’s imaginative personal Christmas cards which blend conventional Christmas imagery with traditional Chinese painting style and elements.
May 15, 2005 – February 26, 2006

Sam Boi Lee, Mother's Pillbox, 2003, lightjet print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. 20" x 24".

A Portrait of My Mother by Sam Boi Lee
The Chinese American Museum is proud to announce a new art exhibit featuring the photographic series, A Portrait of My Mother by Sam Boi Lee, an emerging Los Angeles-based, Chinese American photographer.

As a cultural history museum, CAM values work by local emerging artists who address the broad scope of our mission in provocative and exploratory ways. Lee’s poignant photographic series about his mother, Binh Tu Phan, operates like a photo-essay told through eloquent images of his mother’s world, from everyday objects that are imbued with his mother’s nurturing strength to his own expressions of loss and love. As much more than just delicate remembrances, these photographs are as sentimental and ethereal as they are grounded in the realities of his mother’s everyday life —from the fleeting and mundane to moments of great anguish, love, uncertainty, frustration, and enlightenment.

Lee’s A Portrait of My Mother provides museum visitors with glimpses at the connections between the history lessons we teach at CAM and the individual stories that come to shape that history. In the wake of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Lee’s immediate family strategically split up and fled Vietnam to all parts of the globe. As the son of a P.O.W. and the youngest of nine children, Lee was only six years old when he embarked on this emigration. After multiple migrations, the family finally reunited in Los Angeles ten years later. By pairing this gripping American story, as told in the museum’s permanent exhibit about immigration, Journeys, alongside Lee’s body of photographs in A Portrait of My Mother, we invite visitors to consider the ways in which ordinary people make history everyday, how we remember our history, and how history shapes our present and our future.
May 15, 2005 – February 26, 2006

Untitled, Guoache on paper board, 30" x 40", 1970s.

John Kwok: Line and Color
This exhibit features artwork by local artist John Kwok (1920-1983), an important figure in Los Angeles’ art scene and the Chinese American community since the 1940s. As a member of the National Watercolor Society, California Watercolor Society and American Watercolor Society, his art was a fixture in regional and national shows from 1947 to 1982. Kwok’s artistic achievements and the large body of work that he leaves behind represent his commitment to making art and his contribution to Chinese American history. Among the fifty works featured in this exhibit are six award-winning pieces, as well as works from Kwok’s personal collection that are on public display for the first time.
November 13, 2004 – May 1, 2005

(Invisible): Angel Island by Cindy Suriyani
Created by Los Angeles-based artist Cindy Suryiani, this mixed media art installation consists of light, hanging Chinese rice paper scrolls and life size puppets to explore themes of identity, displacement, inclusion, and ultimately of Americanism. Named after the grueling immigrant processing center off the coast of San Francisco, the body of work reinterprets the Island (as it was called by its inmates), from a political, historical perspective, and explores the experiences of the Island’s many Chinese detainees.
Suriyani’s work illustrates the poems of hope, frustration, and longing etched into the barracks’ walls, bedposts, and open surfaces by immigrants from China’s Pearl River Delta. The Island symbolizes more than a rite of passage into the multitude of uncertainties that defined Chinese American experience in the early Twentieth Century. As a nation of immigrants and their descendants, this exhibit underscores the issue of transculturalism, our struggle for human dignity, and our need to make where we are a place we can call home
July 9, 2004 - May 1, 2005.

Tyrus Wong, Self Portrait, 14 1/2 " x 21 3/8", late 1920s, watercolor on paper, Chinese American Museum, gift of Sanora Babb Howe.

Tyrus Wong: A Retrospective
This exhibit showcased the works of Tyrus Wong, who at the age of 93, is one of the earliest and most influential Chinese American artists in the United States. In his long, pioneering career as a local artist, Wong is a seasoned painter, muralist, ceramicist, lithographer, designer, and kite maker. The exhibit will also feature Wong’s imaginative kites, which he has been building and flying for the past 30 years. Drawn from public and private collections, several of the pieces chosen for this exhibition have not been shown publicly since the 1930s.
December 18, 2004 – October 17, 2004

Chinatown Stories: Realizing the Imagined by Steve Wong
This installation piece explores the theme of community through the use of postcards. By collecting personal stories and memories from community members, as well as the sellers of the vintage Chinatown postcards he has amassed on e-bay for this project, Steve Wong enters these disparate voices into a dialogue of ideas about Chinatown, specifically, and what places come to mean in everyday life.
December 18, 2003– June 18, 2004

Past Off-Site Exhibits:

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