Five Curators on Five Artists

Bernice Bing was a painter associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Beat Generation. Despite studying under the likes of Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell and exhibiting alongside contemporaries such as Manuel Neri and Jay DeFeo, Bing remains overlooked and understudied, undoubtedly because she was queer, Chinese American, and a woman. 

Bing rejected readings of social difference into her work, seeing them as simplistic and reductive. However, I contend that her intersecting identities created a complexity of being – a sense of multiplicity that allowed Bing to hold so many parts of the world together in generous tandem.

In her ever-evolving explorations of the unconscious mind, New Age spirituality, Eastern calligraphy, and natural Californian landscapes, as well as her roles as an artist, community organizer, and arts administrator, Bing demonstrates the ways that queer women of color contain infinite possibility.

Since that time, [Matt Huynh], this Vietnamese Australian (now based in NYC) artist-illustrator-animator extraordinaire has authored a wide array of work, including, I’m happy to say, a number of projects in collaboration with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center: 

Kung Fu Zombies vs Shaman Warrior, a 2016 animated adaptation of a play-in-progress by Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay; The Ark, a 2017 animated adaptation of the preface to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s then novel-in-progress The Committed; and “On True War Stories,” a graphic narrative adaptation of an essay by the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, published in the Massachusetts Review in 2018, collected in Best American Non-Required Reading 2019. 

 In mid-March 2021, when the New Yorker launched the groundbreaking Reeducated, a virtual reality documentary about the detention and political reeducation of ethnic and religious minorities in China, I wasn’t surprised to see Matty as its central artist. 

In 2016, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center collaborated with Monica to create Kama, a “jungle” of iconographies that represent identity as an interconnected universe that includes Filipino indigeneity, colonization, and diaspora.

Encountering the photograph upon my arrival to New York as a young art historian, one of the few Asian Americans in the field at that time, it ignited a new awareness of powerful voices outside the Eurocentric perspective I had been schooled in.

Twenty years later, serendipitously, I had the pleasure of acquiring the photograph for [Asia Society] as a tribute to museum's trailblazing roots in the field and a reminder of the power of images to impassion and inspire.

In fact, in the pre- and post-war periods in which Kingman was active, there were just a scant few visual artists of Asian descent who were pursuing a life in the arts. 

Kingman's ethnicity -- he was born in 1911 to Chinese immigrants in Oakland, CA -- however, is not the only reason why we should take a closer look at his work.

His Mott Street 2 watercolor from 1952, likely painted on the spot in plein air, shows an assured colorist with an imaginative eye for dramatic light and shadow that recalls the seaside watercolors of Edward Hopper, Kingman's contemporary.

In the foreground, he carefully renders a red store sign for an herbal medicine shop on the ground floor of a quintessential New York tenement building, complete with rickety fire escapes and wiry TV antennas jutting from the roof. 


The painting begs many questions. What was the artist thinking when he chose this view? Why did he stop in the middle? Who else was on the street that day?

I can easily imagine him walking towards Transfiguration, making a right on Pell Street, then another right down a windy Doyers Street to stop for a bite at Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest dim sum restaurant in Chinatown.