Tire Wong

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Tyrus Wong (2014)

Tyrus Wong (born October 25, 1910 in Taishan , † December 30, 2016 in Sunland-Tujunga , Los Angeles ) was an American artist . He mainly worked as an illustrator and lithographer for animated film productions for Warner Bros. and Disney . Best known of these is Bambi .

biography

Early years

Tire Wong was born as Wong Gen Yeo in a farming village in the Chinese province of Guangdong ; Even as a child he showed his artistic talent, which was encouraged by his father. In 1920 his father emigrated with him to the USA. His mother and sister stayed in China; Wong never saw her again. He and his father traveled under false names as Chinese migrants were not allowed to enter the country at the time due to the Chinese Exclusion Act . Since many registration papers were burned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which was associated with many fires , it was no longer possible to precisely check whether relatives were allowed to join them, as many Chinese illegally resident in the USA stated that they were born there. They were able to allow other Chinese to enter the country by stating that they were their close relatives. The authorities tried to prevent this through strict questioning.

Wong's father was soon allowed to leave the assembly center on Angel Island because he had papers that identify him as a resident of the United States. Gen Yeo was the only child there for four weeks without his father. After his questioning on January 27, 1921, which he survived on the basis of memorized answers, he was allowed to leave the camp. He and his father moved to Sacramento , where a teacher Americanized his adopted name, Tai Yow, to Tire on arrival . In Sacramento, Wong attended elementary school and lived in a guest house while his father found work in Los Angeles .

After more than two years, Wong looked for his father in Los Angeles, who was employed in a casino . Father and son lived poorly in a warehouse. Tyrus Wong works after school as a "houseboy" for 50 cents a day. His father practiced drawing and calligraphy with him ; they used watercolors and newspaper because they could not afford ink and writing paper. The father forbade the son to play baseball lest he injure his fingers.

A teacher recognized Wong's talent and got him a summer scholarship to the Otis College of Art and Design . According to his own statements, he found his calling at the design school after having been a rather mediocre student at the previous schools. Since he did not want to return to middle school after the scholarship ended , his father managed to save the tuition for Otis College, and Tire was also employed at the school as a janitor. He was initially the youngest in college, which he graduated with top grades in 1935. Shortly afterwards his father died.

Between 1936 and 1938, Tyrus Wong drew pictures for libraries and public spaces on behalf of the Works Progress Administration . Together with two friends, Wong founded the Oriental Artist Group of LA , which organized exhibitions in California. The group was also commissioned by a restaurant owner in Los Angeles' Chinatown to paint the walls of the building. During this time Wong met his future wife Ruth.

Draftsman at Disney and Warner

Dragon painting by Wong in Los Angeles Chinatown
Dragons of Wong at the Walt Disney Family Museum (2013)

In 1938, at the insistence of his wife - he had meanwhile married - Tyrus Wong applied successfully to Disney as an intermediate draftsman for the sequences of animated films . But the repetitive drawing of the same picture over and over with only minor changes turned out to be a boring, undemanding occupation for him.

Wong got a chance to prove his skills when Disney was planning the popular novel Bambi. To film a life story from the forest . The designs, which were based on previous films, did not fit the theme, and Wong's watercolors and drawings of landscape scenes delighted Walt Disney . Wong gave the film an unmistakable signature: its simple style, based on Chinese art, was "revolutionary". He was promoted in the studios as an “inspired drawing artist” and worked on the project for the following two years, where he was chief designer and supervised the other employees. In 1941, a year before Bambi premiered , he was fired after a staff strike against unequal pay. In the film Bambi , which was shown for the first time shortly afterwards , he was only mentioned far back in the credits .

In 1942, Wong began drawing for Warner Bros. He stayed in this company until his retirement in 1968. There he was involved in You were our comrade (1949), ... because they don't know what they're doing (1955) and The Wild Bunch - They knew no law (1969) . He also drew Christmas cards for Hallmark , some of which sold over a million times. It was also "loaned" to other studios. When the studio was busy, he worked on his uncle's ranch, harvesting tomatoes and asparagus. In 1946 he became a citizen of the United States.

Between 1944 and 1950, Tyrus Wong worked evenings and weekends at the Winfield Pottery in Pasadena, painting 48 plates as well as bowls and a teapot made by Margaret Mears Gabriel in those years . He painted objects intended for sale as well as those intended for friends. He painted the commercial parts in the black and white style typical of the Song period (960–1279), mainly horses in motion. 2004, all these objects were common in the exhibition Mid-Century Mandarin: the Clay Canvases of Tyrus Wong of the Museum of California Design shown. Wong himself was surprised to see all these ceramics more than 50 years after he had held them in his hands: with some objects he could not even remember having painted them.

Retired

In retirement, Wong became a renowned hobbyist of airworthy kites , of which he built over 200, also in memory of his father, who had given him a kite as a child. He planned, built, and colored them in a variety of shapes in lengths of up to 100  feet (about 30 meters). He let the kites fly himself on the Santa Monica Pier : “Fresh air, beautiful view, pretty girls in bikinis - it's great!” He himself commented on his hobby at the age of 80.

Between 1980 and 1995, Tyrus Wong cared for his wife Ruth, who had dementia, until her death. He died in his home in 2016 at the age of 106, leaving three daughters and two grandchildren.

Honors and reception

In 2001, Wong received the Historymakers Award from the Chinese American Museum and was also recognized as a Disney Legend . Some of his works, including kites, are on display at the Walt Disney Family Museum .

Wong's work has been recognized in numerous exhibitions: From October to December 2004 the Chinese American Museum showed a retrospective of Wong's work. In 2006 he was honored by the Association internationale du film d'animation , the international association of animation filmmakers , with the Annie for his life's work.

In 2007, Tyrus Wong was one of three illustrators featured in The Art of the Motion Picture Illustrator: William B. Major, Harold Michelson and Tyrus Wong at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ' s Grand Lobby Gallery in Beverly Hills .

From January to May 2012, Wong's work was presented in the exhibition Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles at the Vincent Price Art Museum in New York . The companion volume was the book Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong , published by the Walt Disney Family Foundation Press . In 2015, a retrospective of the 80 years of work of Wong Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong, followed at the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan .

Also in 2015, the 77-minute documentary Tyrus Wong was produced , directed by Pamela Tom . The film was named best film at the Asian World Film Festival in 2016.

On the occasion of his 108th birthday in 2018, the search engine Google showed a doodle in video form in honor of the artist and his work.

literature

  • John Canemaker : Before the Animation Begins. The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists. Hyperion, New York NY 1996, ISBN 0-7868-6152-5 .
  • Michael Labrie: Water to Paper, Paint to Sky. The Art of Tire Wong. Walt Disney Family Foundation Press, San Francisco CA 2013, ISBN 978-1-61628-682-8 .

Web links

Commons : Tyrus Wong  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Rosalind Chang: A Profile of Tyrus Wong. (No longer available online.) In: Angel Island. Immigration Station Foundation. Archived from the original on November 11, 2013 ; accessed on December 31, 2016 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aiisf.org
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Tyrus Wong, 'Bambi' Artist Thwarted by Racial Bias, Dies at 106 on the New York Times website , accessed January 1, 2016
  3. ^ A b Immigrant Voices: Discover Immigrant Stories from Angel Island. (No longer available online.) In: aiisf.org. December 30, 1920, archived from the original on January 1, 2017 ; accessed on January 1, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / aiisf.org
  4. ↑ a b Tire Wong. In: Otis College of Art and Design. Retrieved January 1, 2017 .
  5. ↑ a b Rip Rense: Kite Man Preserves Father's Hobby. Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1989, accessed January 1, 2017 .
  6. ↑ a b CHSSC 2011 Honorees - Tyrus Wong. In: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. Retrieved January 1, 2017 .
  7. ^ Museum of California Design • Exhibitions. (No longer available online.) In: mocad.org. October 25, 2015, archived from the original on January 2, 2017 ; accessed on January 2, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mocad.org
  8. ^ Past Exhibitions. (No longer available online.) In: Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles. July 12, 2014, archived from the original on January 1, 2017 ; accessed on January 1, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / camla.org
  9. ↑ Deborah Netburn: They drew the scenes did wurde the movies. Los Angeles Times , September 21, 2007; accessed January 1, 2017 .
  10. ^ PST, A to Z: 'Round the Clock' at Vincent Price Art Museum. Los Angeles Times , March 16, 2012, accessed January 1, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Elizabeth Yuan: From 'Bambi' to Kites, His Work Flies High. In: wsj.com. March 26, 2015, accessed January 1, 2017 .
  12. ↑ TIRE. In: Asian American International Film. July 24, 2016, accessed January 1, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Tyrus Wong: Nice Google Doodle for the 108th birthday of the Disney legend & the Bambi artist . In: GoogleWatchBlog . October 24, 2018 ( googlewatchblog.de [accessed October 24, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Wong, Tire
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wong Gen Yeo (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Taishan
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2016
Place of death Sunland-Tujunga , Los Angeles