4 AAPI artists from the Asian Art Museum

San Francisco native Bernice Bing (Lee Yu Bing, 李玉冰, 1936–1998) was an artist and activist whose work was rarely shown in her lifetime. 

A student of Richard Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa, "Bingo" became a central figure in the Beat scene and later, a dedicated community organizer. The Asian Art Museum acquired 20 works by Bing and staged the first retrospective of her work in 2022.

Born in San Francisco, Carlos Villa (1936–2013) was a groundbreaking American artist whose work broadened the horizons of 20th-century modernism. 

Villa's search for personal and aesthetic meaning in his own Filipino heritage and global indigenous cultures led him to develop an original and expansive approach to art and the role of the artist.   

Jade Snow Wong (1922–2006) was an artist and author known for her brightly colored forms inspired by the simple shapes and rich color palette of Chinese ceramics of the Song dynasty. 

Wong is the author of "Fifth Chinese Daughter," a book that chronicles her life growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown community. She also served as a U.S. State Department cultural ambassador speaking to audiences throughout Asia. 

Born in 1885 in Japan, Chiura Obata (1885–1975)  is renowned as a 20th-century master who merged Japanese painting techniques and styles with modern American abstraction. He studied ink painting before immigrating to California in 1903, settling in San Francisco’s Japantown.

After an influential trip to Yosemite, Obata began devoting his art to portraying the beauty of nature. Over the course of a seven-decade career, he became a prominent educator at UC Berkeley and a leading figure in the California art scene.