PBA Galleries

8 x 15” (on sheet embossed as Strathmore Drawing Board). Undated, ca. 1918 possibly painted by Fong during his residence in Portland, Oregon.

Though the Chinese artist’s signature on this watercolor cannot be deciphered, it is believed to be an early work by noted Chinese-American San Francisco artist Wylog [Wy Lok] Fong. 

Born in San Francisco in the 1890s, the son of a tailor, Fong spent his childhood in the city’s pre-Earthquake “Old Chinatown” – where he witnessed the street scenes he later idealized in his paintings. He moved with his family to Portland, where he attended high school and began to study art at the Museum Art School. There, he contracted with the West Coast Engraving Company to produce Chinatown sketches which were widely marketed as color prints throughout the 1920s, particularly popular in California department stores. Returning to San Francisco, where his name was well known, Fong also did some magazine illustration and portrait painting (on velvet), but his romanticized style went out of fashion and his later attempts at “realism” were not well-received. He moved to Los Angeles, joined the Art Students League and was last heard of as a “sidewalk pastel portrait artist” in LA Chinatown where he died in 1974.