Toshio Aoki, Chiura Obata, and Yang Ling-fu

–Mark Dean Johnson





Toshio Aoki relocated to the United States in 1880, when the passion for Japonisme was at its peak. His American work varied in subject matter (including avian imagery, still life, and mythological figures) as well as in style, which ranged from visionary Nihonga to familiar American rendering. Aoki is often known for his decorative images of flying Chinese female deities; examples include his multiple representations of Chang-E ascending to the moon. In this example (Plate 1), she is seen surrounded by flowing robes and scarves, accompanied by two children, and with her rabbit companion nestled in her upraised hand, all of this against a roiling and threatening night sky of abstract ink.
Aoki also painted other deities. His underwater Fish Basket Kannon (Fig. 14) in the collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, depicts one of the thirty-one mani- festations of the bodhisattva of compassion and is sometimes interpreted as a reference to prostitutes, according to the museum’s acquisition report.

Although Aoki achieved in his lifetime a high profile as an artist (and as the adoptive father of actress Tsuru, who married film star Sessue Hayakawa, both of whom were well positioned in early Hollywood), only a few dozen examples of Aoki’s fine art have surfaced to date, suggesting that full recognition of his achievement is still to be articulated.

Transcendentalist Chiura Obata was astutely sensitive to nature and is known for having created brilliantly dynamic images that capture different moments of California weather. His scroll painting Rain (Fig. 15), also in the collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, shows an old and luxuriant tree (maybe a Berkeley eucalyptus or willow) during a shower; the scene is rendered with such skill, it seems we are witnessing the tree’s very absorption of the nourishing water.

Obata’s masterful painting on silk titled A Storm Nearing Yosemite Government Center (Plate 2) shows mountain ridges and floating bands of clouds that communicate weather’s unpredictable energy in the high country of the Sierra Nevada range, a geography that became associated with the artist after his extended art and backpacking trek there in 1927. Unlike the limited and scattered artistic archives of Aoki, Obata’s oeuvre is still largely intact. During the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it was safeguarded in the attic of the president’s residence at the University of California, Berkeley, where Obata was an influential teacher for decades. Consequently, Obata’s legacy is more fully available for study and appreciation.

The art of Yang Ling-fu is only just now being seen after decades out of public sight. This exhibition showcases her work for the first time in maybe fifty years. After arriving in San Francisco as an early Chinese artist-refugee in 1936, Yang presented her work in exhibitions including the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in 1939, but she never reached the profile she had achieved in China, where she was the first female president of an art college. These paintings from the late 1930s and 1940s show an artist of great discipline and focus, who responded to her new American context with a brighter palette and stronger naturalism than seen in her earlier work in China (Plate 3 and Fig. 16). Yang ultimately relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea and invited several other artists to join her in developing a Chinese artist colony there. Although not directly the result of her personal invitations, that did, in fact, happen, as artists including Cheng Yet-por, Hu Chi Chung, S. C. Yuan, and even Chang Dai-chien made it their home.