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NY Times, Jan. 1 2017
Tyrus Wong, ‘Bambi’ Artist Thwarted by Racial Bias, Dies at 106
By MARGALIT FOX
When Walt Disney’s “Bambi” opened in 1942, critics praised its spare,
haunting visual style, vastly different from anything Disney had done
before.
But what they did not know was that the film’s striking appearance had
been created by a Chinese immigrant artist, who took as his inspiration
the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty. The extent of his
contribution to “Bambi,” which remains a high-water mark for film
animation, would not be widely known for decades.
Like the film’s title character, the artist, Tyrus Wong, weathered
irrevocable separation from his mother — and, in the hope of making a
life in America, incarceration, isolation and rigorous interrogation —
all when he was still a child.
In the years that followed, he endured poverty, discrimination and
chronic lack of recognition, not only for his work at Disney but also
for his fine art, before finding acclaim in his 90s.
Mr. Wong died on Friday at 106. A Hollywood studio artist, painter,
printmaker, calligrapher, greeting-card illustrator and, in later years,
maker of fantastical kites, he was one of the most celebrated
Chinese-American artists of the 20th century.
But because of the marginalization to which Asian-Americans were long
subject, he passed much of his career unknown to the general public.
Artistic recognition, when Mr. Wong did find it, was all the more
noteworthy for the fact that among Chinese immigrant men of his
generation, professional prospects were largely limited to menial jobs
like houseboy and laundryman.
Trained as a painter, Mr. Wong was a leading figure in the Modernist
movement that flourished in California between the first and second
World Wars. In 1932 and again in 1934, his work was included in group
shows at the Art Institute of Chicago that also featured Picasso,
Matisse and Paul Klee.
As a staff artist for Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the 1960s, he
drew storyboards and made vibrant paintings, as detailed as any
architectural illustrations, that helped the director envision each
scene before it was shot.
Over the years his work informed the look of animated pictures for
Disney and live-action films for Warner Brothers and other studios,
among them “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), “Rebel Without a Cause”
(1955) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969).
But of the dozens of films on which he worked, it was for “Bambi” that
Mr. Wong was — belatedly — most renowned.
“He was truly involved with every phase of production,” John Canemaker,
an Oscar-winning animator and a historian of animation at New York
University, said in an interview for this obituary in March. “He created
an art direction that had really never been seen before in animation.”
In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Wong was the subject of “Water to Paper, Paint to
Sky,” a major retrospective at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.
From the museum’s windows, which overlook San Francisco Bay, he could
contemplate Angel Island, where more than nine decades earlier, as a
lone 10-year-old, he had sought to gain admission to a country that
adamantly did not want him.
Wong Gen Yeo (the name is sometimes Romanized Wong Gaing Yoo) was born
on Oct. 25, 1910, in a farming village in Guangdong Province. As a young
child, he already exhibited a love of drawing and was encouraged by his
father.
In 1920, seeking better economic prospects, Gen Yeo and his father
embarked for the United States, leaving his mother and sister behind.
Gen Yeo would never see his mother again.
They were obliged to travel under false identities — a state of affairs
known among Chinese immigrants as being a “paper son” — in the hope of
circumventing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, the act, which
drastically curtailed the number of Chinese people allowed to enter the
country, was among the earliest United States laws to impose severe
restrictions on immigration.
But in 1906, an unforeseen loophole opened in the form of the San
Francisco earthquake and fire. Because a huge number of municipal
documents, including birth and immigration records, were destroyed, many
newly arrived Chinese capitalized on the loss, maintaining that they had
been born in San Francisco before the fire.
As United States citizens, they were entitled to bring over their
relatives — or, in the case of Gen Yeo and his father, “paper sons”
posing as relatives.
Attuned to the deception, United States immigration officials put
Chinese arrivals through a formidable inquisition to ensure they were
who they claimed to be.
The questions came like gunfire: In which direction does your village
face? How many windows are in your house? Where in the house is the rice
bin? How wide is your well? How deep? Are there trees in your village?
Are there lakes? What shops can you name?
The sponsoring relative was interrogated separately, and the answers had
to match. For the new arrival, a major mistake, or a series of smaller
ones, could mean deportation.
To stand a chance of passing, aspirants memorized rigorous dossiers
known as coaching papers. The ensuing interrogation was hard enough for
adults. Ten-year-old Gen Yeo would undergo it alone.
On Dec. 30, 1920, after a month at sea, the Wongs landed at Angel Island
Immigration Station. The elder Mr. Wong was traveling as a merchant
named Look Get; his son as Look Tai Yow.
“Angel Island is considered to be the Ellis Island of the West Coast,”
Lisa See, the author of “On Gold Mountain” (1995), a nonfiction
chronicle of her Chinese-American family, said in an interview in 2016.
However, she continued: “The goal was really very different than Ellis
Island, which was supposed to be so welcoming. Angel Island opened very
specifically to keep the Chinese out.”
Because Mr. Wong’s father had previously lived in the United States as
Look Get, he was able to clear Immigration quickly. But as a new
arrival, Gen Yeo was detained on the island for nearly a month, the only
child among the immigrants being held there.
“I was scared half to death; I just cried,” Mr. Wong recalled in
“Tyrus,” an award-winning documentary directed by Pamela Tom, which
premiered in 2015. “Every day is just miserable — miserable. I hated
that place.”
On Jan. 27, 1921, in the presence of an interpreter and a stenographer,
young Gen Yeo, posing as Look Tai Yow, was interrogated by three
inspectors. His father had already been questioned.
Gen Yeo was well prepared and answered without error. In Sacramento,
where he joined his father, a schoolteacher Americanized “Tai Yow” to
“Tyrus,” and he was known as Tyrus Wong ever after.
Soon afterward, father and son were separated once more, when the elder
Mr. Wong moved to Los Angeles to seek work. For reasons that have been
lost to time, he could not take his son. Tyrus lived on his own in a
Sacramento boardinghouse while attending elementary school.
Two years later — possibly more — Tyrus traveled to Los Angeles to join
his father, who had found work in a gambling den. They lived in a
vermin-infested boardinghouse sandwiched between a butcher shop and a
brothel. After school, Tyrus worked as a houseboy for two Pasadena
families, earning 50 cents a day.
His first art teacher was his father, who trained him nightly in
calligraphy by having him dip a brush in water and trace ghostly
characters on newspaper: They could not afford ink or drawing paper.
When Tyrus was in junior high, a teacher, noting his drawing talent,
arranged a summer scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
By his own account an indifferent student in public school, Tyrus found
his calling at the institute, now the Otis College of Art and Design.
When his scholarship ended he declined to return to junior high.
His father scraped together the $90 tuition — a small fortune — to let
him stay on as Otis’s youngest student.
He studied there for at least five years, simultaneously working as the
school janitor, before graduating in the 1930s. Not long afterward his
father died, leaving young Mr. Wong entirely on his own.
From 1936 to 1938, Mr. Wong was an artist for the Works Progress
Administration, creating paintings for libraries and other public spaces.
With friends, including the Japanese-American artist Benji Okubo, he
founded the Oriental Artists’ Group of Los Angeles, which organized
exhibitions of members’ work — an unheard-of level of exposure for Asian
artists at the time.
Mr. Wong, newly married and needing steady work, joined Disney in 1938
as an “in-betweener,” creating the thousands of intermediate drawings
that bring animated sequences to life.
Asians were then a novelty at Hollywood studios, and Mr. Wong was made
keenly aware of the fact, first at Disney and later at Warner Brothers.
One co-worker flung a racial epithet at him. Another assumed on sight
that he worked in the company cafeteria.
Then there was the affront of the in-betweener’s job itself:
Painstaking, repetitive and for Mr. Wong quickly soul-numbing, it is the
assembly-line work of animation — “a terrible use of his talents as a
landscape artist and a painter,” Mr. Canemaker said.
A reprieve came in the late 1930s, when Mr. Wong learned that Disney was
adapting “Bambi, a Life in the Woods,” the 1923 novel by the Austrian
writer Felix Salten about a fawn whose mother is killed by a hunter.
In trying to animate the book, Disney had reached an impasse. The studio
had enjoyed great success in 1937 with its animated film “Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs,” a baroque production in which every detail of the
backgrounds — every petal on every flower, every leaf on every tree —
was meticulously represented.
In an attempt to use a similar style for “Bambi,” it found that the
ornate backgrounds camouflaged the deer and other forest creatures on
which the narrative centered.
Mr. Wong spied his chance.
“I said, ‘Gee, this is all outdoor scenery,’” he recalled in a video
interview years afterward, adding: “I said, ‘Gee, I’m a landscape painter!’”
Invoking the exquisite landscape paintings of the Song dynasty (A.D.
960–1279), he rendered in watercolors and pastels a series of nature
scenes that were moody, lyrical and atmospheric — at once lush and spare
— with backgrounds subtly suggested by a stroke or two of the brush.
“Walt Disney went crazy over them,” said Mr. Canemaker, who wrote about
Mr. Wong in his book “Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of
Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists” (1996). “He said, ‘I love this
indefinite quality, the mysterious quality of the forest.’”
Mr. Wong was unofficially promoted to the rank of inspirational sketch
artist.
“But he was more than that,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “He was the
designer; he was the person they went to when they had questions about
the color, about how to lay something out. He even influenced the music
and the special effects: Just by the look of the drawings, he inspired
people.”
Mr. Wong spent two years painting the illustrations that would inform
every aspect of “Bambi.” Throughout the finished film — lent a brooding
quality by its stark landscapes; misty, desaturated palette; and figures
often seen in silhouette — his influence is unmistakable.
But in 1941, in the wake of a bitter employees’ strike that year, Disney
fired Mr. Wong. Though he had chosen not to strike — he felt the studio
had been good to him, Mr. Canemaker said — he was let go amid the
lingering climate of post-strike resentments.
On “Bambi,” Mr. Wong’s name appears, quite far down in the credits, as a
mere “background” artist.
Mr. Wong joined Warner Brothers in 1942, working there — and lent out on
occasion to other studios — until his retirement in 1968.
The indignities he endured were not confined to the studios. Trying to
buy a house, he and his wife, the former Ruth Kim, were told that each
property they inquired about had just been sold. “Then in a month you’d
go back there and the sign was still there,” Mr. Wong recalled in “Tyrus.”
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Mr. Wong,
like many Chinese-Americans, took to wearing a lapel button proclaiming
his heritage, lest an angry American beat him up on the street.
The war permanently dispersed the fledgling Oriental Artists’ Group. Mr.
Wong’s friend Mr. Okubo was sent, with tens of thousands of other
Japanese-Americans, to an internment camp.
“If World War II hadn’t happened when it did, I think these artists,
even the Chinese-American artists, would have more of a name than they
do today,” Ms. See said. “And that’s because this little movement that
had just barely started was split apart by the war.”
Mr. Wong, who became a United States citizen in 1946, also designed
Christmas cards for Hallmark and painted elegant Asian-inflected designs
on dinnerware, now sought after by collectors.
A longtime resident of Sunland, Calif., he became, in retirement, a
renowned kitemaker, designing, building and hand coloring astonishing,
airworthy creations — butterflies, swallows, whole flocks of owls,
centipedes more than 100 feet long — that streaked the Southern
California sky like paint on blue canvas.
During the last 15 years of Ruth Wong’s life, when she was ill with
dementia, Mr. Wong forsook his work to care for her. After her death in
1995, he slowly began making art again.
In 2001, in formal recognition of his influence on “Bambi,” Mr. Wong was
named a Disney Legend. The honor — whose previous recipients include
Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews and Annette Funicello — is bestowed by the
Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions.
In 2003, a retrospective of his work, curated in part by Ms. See, was
the inaugural exhibition at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles.
Disney’s own retrospective, “Water to Paper, Paint to Sky,” traveled in
2015 to the Museum of Chinese in America, in Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Wong’s death, at his home in Sunland, was confirmed by the filmmaker
Ms. Tom. His survivors include three daughters, Kay Fong, Tai-Ling Wong
and Kim Wong; and two grandchildren.
When his daughters were small, Mr. Wong encouraged them to make art, as
his father had encouraged him. Yet he would not let them have coloring
books.
The reason was simple: He did not want his children constrained, he
said, by lines laid down by others.
--
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