PBA Galleries

2 items:
• Artist Martha Sawyers, “China First To Fight!/ United China Relief/Participating in National War Fund” ca. 1944.Striking 14 x 19” multi-color poster, depicting a Chinese soldier with his wounded wife and child.  Top corner clipped off, with no loss of text.
• World War II multi-color Texas poster for Chinese singer and lecturer touring America.. 11 x 16”, 1pg. “China Sings On / Philip Yung Lee…One of the Best Known Chinese in America, Tells the Fascinating Story of His People / Sponsored by a Sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek... ‘The Finest Chinese Singer of This Generation’ …Music on Ancient Chinese Instruments / Talks on the Culture and Music of the East and the West”. Illustrated with photos of Lee and his wife (Dallas, Texas, undated [Feb. 1942])

After studying with George Luks at the Art Students League in New York, Martha Sawyers and her husband traveled throughout the Far East in the 1930s, settling in Beijing until the Japanese invasion of 1937 forced their narrow escape to Shanghai. Returning to the US, Sawyers worked as an illustrator for Colliers magazine until the end of World War II, when she went back to China as an Army War correspondent for Life magazine. This classic poster displays her sensitive wartime work, when aid to war-torn China was a popular cause célèbre among the American public.
Also capitalizing on wartime pro-China sentiment, Philip Yung Lee was a handsome young Chinese Evangelical Christian immigrant who toured small-town America in the 1930s and 40s, singing in his native language and talking about his country to admiring white audiences. Born in Canton, he had come to the US with a grant from Chiang Kai-shek’s sister-in-law to study music at Northwestern University, where he met his wife, a nurse. Both a talented musician and a missionary preacher, Lee was pastor of a church in Chicago’s Chinatown and director of a Christian broadcasting station in Shanghai before settling permanently in Los Angeles as a Presbyterian clergyman and lecturer. During the War, he directed his church choir in a “marching song of soldiers and guerrillas” used in the sound track of 1943 Paramount film “China” and post-war wrote a widely-used Chinese-American Hymnal. Ephemera of Lee’s wartime performances are scarce.