Twitter Account Deleted

We ain’t gonna play on Musk’s farm no more…

Well, he tells all he’s the savior of me and you

he’s 83, but he says he’s 52

He spent 44 billion to poison democracy too

Well, I try my best to be just like I am

But everybody wants you to be just like them

They say “Sing while you slave” and “We Say No”

We ain’t gonna play on Musk’s farm no more…

-Moc Bylan

 

 

FYI: Playing with Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm seemed like the thing to do for this!

PS, If anybody can suggest a good replacement, let us know!

Year of the Pig Exhibit

Happy New Year of The Pig!

Art Salon Chinatown is pleased to invite you to an exhibition celebrating the New Lunar Year of the Earth Pig/Boar. Over 20 artists have created celebratory interpretations of the Boar or Pig in various mediums. Join us as we welcome the start of this year, filled with the promise of harmony, success, peace, and prosperity!

Opening Reception: Saturday February 2, 2019 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm

Exhibition Dates: Saturday, February 2 through Sunday, March 17, 2019

Yuri Shimojo, Year of the Wild Pig / 亥年 2018, Edition of 100, 8.5 X 11 inches (21.5 X 28 cm) Silkscreen on Hand deckled Torinoko Washi Japanese Paper, Signed and numbered by artist, Printed by Keigo Prints, NY

Participating Artists:

Douglas Alvarez, Dina Farris Appel, Edmund Arevalo, Terri Berman, Polly Chu, Martha Fernandez, Debbi Green,  Jose Angel Hernandez, Eileen Hsu, Amanda Huynh, Pinguino Kolb, Sandra Low, Chris MacDonald, Man One, Crisselle Mendiola, Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza, Alex Reed, Victor Rosas, Kuniko Ruch, Lisa Isabella Russo, Charlene Shih, Yuri Shimojo, Nikolai Solima, Corey Stein, Victoria Tao, Elizabeth Younce.

Polly Chu, Jia - (home is a roof with a pig underneath), 2019, Egg tempera & pencil on wood, 5 x 5.25 inches

Alex Reed, Year of the Boar, 2019, Various textiles, 24 x 18 inches

Kuniko Ruch, Silk Purse, 2018, Oil with resin on canvas, 10 x 10 inches

Debbi Green, Il Cinghiale Italiano, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 10 x 10 x 2 inches

Corey Stein, Manischewitz Moongate, 2019, Mixed media diptych, Various dimensions

Terri Berman, Fashionista, 2019, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 16 x 20 inches

Amanda Huynh, Golden, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 inches

Chris MacDonald, Fragile, 2019, Acrylic & newspaper on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Man One, When Pigs Flew, 2019, Aerosol & acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Dina Farris Appel,  I Am Not Your Profit, 2018, Acrylic and paper on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Sandra Low, Year of the Boar, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, wood dowels, 30 x 17 inches

Yuri Shimojo, Year of the Wild Pig / 亥年, 2018, Silkscreen on Hand deckled Torinoko Washi Japanese Paper,
Edition of 100, 8.5 x 11 inches

Charlene Shih, Double Happiness, 2019, Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 x 2 inches

Elizabeth Jean Younce, Nature the Gentlest Mother, 2017, Lithograph, 20 x 16 inches

Victoria Tao, Boarialus, 2016, Oil on Yupo, 20 x 20 inches

Eileen Hsu, Taking on the Year of the Pig, 2019, Paint, canvas, paper collage, 21.5 x 17 inches

Jose Angel Hernandez, Year of the Pig, 2018, Mixed media with 3D elements, 25 x 25 inches

Douglas Alvarez, Courageous, 2019, Acrylic on wood, 11 x 14 inches

Edmund Arevalo, Boaring Chores, 2018, 11 x 14 inches

Victor Rosas, Untitled, 2019, Acrylic on spray can, 7.5 x 4 inches

Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza, Deviled Ham, 2019, Shrinky links plastic, colored pencil, 4 x 3.5 inches

Pinguino Kolb, Good Fortune in 2019, 2019, Digital, 16 x 12 inches

Crisselle Mendiola, Year of the Boar, 2019, Gouache, 17 x 21 inches

Lisa Isabella Russo, Fortune Smiles, 2019, Acrylic on board, 5 x 7 inches

Niki Solima, Year of the Boar, 2019, Ballpoint pen and ink, 10 x 8 inches

Martha Fernandez, Fortune of Pigs, 2019, Watercolor on paper, 16 x 16 inches

 

Art Salon Chinatown, a program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

Art Salon Chinatown is located at Realm in Chinatown Central Plaza at 425 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Open Wednesday through Monday 12:00-6:00 PM, Closed Tuesdays & Holidays

 

 

Artist Open Call

Lunar New Year Zodiac Open call 

The Art Salon Chinatown is pleased to invite Southern California artists to participate in Zodiac: Year of the Boar, an exhibition celebrating the Lunar New Year (February 5th). 

The Pig or Boar is considered to be a symbol of wealth. It is last (twelfth) in the Chinese cycle of zodiac animals. 

Pig years: 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019.

The exhibit will open in Early February to coincide with the Lunar New Year. Dates and other details will be announced by mid-January.

To Participate: Please send name, contact info, and links to your website and/or social media where samples of your work are posted to moc [at] TheMinistryOfCulture.com

Space is limited, please submit your info to be considered for the show no later than January 16, 2019 at 6:00 pm. Artist submissions do not guarantee acceptance for the exhibit.

Artists invited to participate in the exhibition must deliver their artwork by Sunday, January 27th at 6:00 PM.

Artwork Requirements: Two dimensional artworks may be no smaller than 4 x 4 inches, and no larger than 24 x 24 inches (including frame, if applicable). Artworks must be ready to hang. Limit one submission per artist.

Important: Artists are responsible for delivery and pick up of their artworks. 

Artworks must be available for sale. Artists receive 50% of the selling price upon purchase. Payments for the sold artworks will be made after the close of the exhibit (TBA).

Medium: painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital, textile. 

Deadline: 

  • Artwork submission deadline: Wednesday, January 16, 6:00 PM 
  • Artwork delivery deadline: Sunday, January 27, 6:00 PM

No Entry Fee

Art Salon Chinatown reserves the right to refuse or reject any artwork for any reason.

Art Salon Chinatown Presents Hushi’s California Silk Road Bazaar

Art Salon Chinatown presents the California Silk Road by Hushi

December 15 –  January 28, 2019

Admission is FREE.

Hushidar Mortezaie, more commonly known as Hushi, is an Iranian American fashion designer, visual artist, and activist based in Los Angeles. As Mortezaie’s California Silk Road boldly attests: his creative practice is deeply rooted in a boundless pride for his queer, Muslim identity, Persian heritage, and experience as an American immigrant.

In response to the emboldened xenophobia of the border wall, Muslim ban, and criminalization of asylum-seekers, the California Silk Road foretells the present as the crackling moment before nations, genders, and borders dissolve. The exhibition is modeled as a bazaar-boutique, a stop along a caravan of the artist’s own making, a “caravan of aliens.” Hushi’s original art and fashion, accompanied by ephemera and reading materials, surround four primary figures who serve as incarnations of the artist’s own persona. Subject to the chokehold of international economics and other systems of control, the Immigrant Merchant wants only to make a living and capitalizes on his own orientalism. The Androgene Star celebrates a broader acceptance of fluid and interstitial gender, but is obsessed with the language of logos and red carpet fame which drives the market. The Barf Ingenue is a newly arrived immigrant, who believed she had to leave Iran to find her voice. She soon discovers the falsehood of the West’s rhetoric and wears the sick residue of her own brainwashing like a brand. Hushi’s Alien is the artist-as-witness: an illegal alien who constructs a new Silk Road, creating space for truth, the grotesque, the weird, and the warped–the wonderful–in the eternal return to the market.

In the active scene of America’s weaponized cultural civil war, played out on a world stage where growing inequities are calculated behind smoke-and-mirror obfuscation, Mortezaie proffers his wearers and viewers with a potent and provocative visual language, replete with splendor, rage, and reverie. His practice resounds with the kind of cultural intelligence and wisdom that comes from the artist’s unique kaleidescopic perspective; he bears witness from a matrix of multiple vantage points that are unavailable to most. It is in this luminous space where Hushi’s affirmations of queerness, history and heritage struggling against erasure, millennia of traditional decoration, global pop culture, and political condemnation catalyze as visual poetry. Mortezaie’s designs weild an indisputable power, employing a profusion of vivid, layered images and motifs, collaged, printed, painted, sewn, or silkscreened on mesh, lace, shimmering sequins, even reproduced as endless ornate patterns. The magic of Mortezaie’s project is its ability to punctuate the current cultural, historical moment to shed light on distortion and cruelty, foster peace and respect instead of conflict, and breed compassion above all else.

About the Artist – Hushidar Mortezaie is an Iranian-born fashion designer, visual artist, and graphic designer based in Los Angeles. He studied fine art at UC Berkeley, fashion design at Parsons School of Design, and fashion illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Mortezaie worked as a buyer and stylist for Patricia Field in the mid 1990s. His work has been featured in media and publications, including BBC, NPR, Vogue, Huffington Post, W magazine, and worn by Linda Evangelista, Beyoncé, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Brad Pitt. Since his first art exhibition, curated by Art Salon Chinatown’s Shervin Shahbazi at Morono Kiang Gallery in 2009, Mortezaie has exhibited his work at art institutions and galleries, including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Southern Exposure, Somarts, and the DeYoung Museum. Mortezaie created a new visual language through his hybrid of graphic design, fashion, and fine art to share his immigrant culture and to inspire a new generation of Iranian youth to stand against alienation with resilience.

 

Art Salon Chinatown, a program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

Art Salon Chinatown is located at Realm in Chinatown Central Plaza at 425 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Open Wednesday through Monday 12:00-6:00 PM, Closed Tuesdays & Holidays

Art Salon Chinatown presents Kristina Wong

The Ministry of Culture is pleased to present the sixth edition of Art Salon Chinatown exhibitions featuring Los Angeles artist Kristina Wong. The exhibition will be on view November 3 – December 10, 2018.

The opening reception will be held on Saturday November 3, 2018 from 5:00 to 8:00 pm at Realm, and will feature a live performance by Kristina as she makes her final campaign appearance before the 2018 midterm elections.

Realm will be transformed (partially!) to Kristina Wong’s Campaign Headquarters. Admission to this interactive performance is FREE to the public. Surprises await!

RSVP HERE!

 

 

About Kristina Wong

Kristina Wong was featured in the New York Times’ Off Color series “highlighting artists of color who use humor to make smart social statements about the sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways that race plays out in America today.” She is a performance artist, comedian and writer who has been presented internationally across North America, the UK, Hong Kong and Africa.  Most recently, her solo theater show The Wong Street Journal was presented by the US Consulate in  Lagos, Nigeria. She’s been a guest on late night shows on Comedy Central and FX.  She recently had a pilot presentation with Lionsgate for truTV. Her commentaries have appeared on American Public Media’s Marketplace, PBS, VICE, Jezebel,Playgirl Magazine, Huffington Post and CNN. She’s been awarded artist residencies from the MacDowell Colony, New York Theater Workshop, and Ojai Playwrights Festival. Her work has been awarded with grants from Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, National Performance Network, and a COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She’s produced a viral web series called How Not to Pick Up Asian Chicks and has just released Radical Cram School– a web series teaching social justice to Asian American kids 7-11.  She’s recently released music videos that accompany her rap album Mzungu Price.  The album and videos were recorded and produced in post-conflict Northern Uganda where she is the only American recording artist at Empire Records Uganda. Her newest performance project is “Kristina Wong for Public Office”– a simultaneous real life campaign for Public Office and performance art piece.

To learn more please visit KristinaWong.com

Art Salon Chinatown, a program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

Realm is located in Chinatown Central Plaza at 425 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Open Wednesday through Monday 12:00-6:00 PM, Closed Tuesday

Art Salon Chinatown presents May Sun

The Ministry of Culture is pleased to present the fifth edition of Art Salon Chinatown exhibitions featuring Los Angeles artist May Sun. The exhibition will be on view September 22 – October 29, 2018. The opening reception will be held on Saturday September 22, 2018 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at Realm (address at the bottom).

It is an honor to present this exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist May Sun.

As a seasoned artist with a career forged in the fresh legacies of the feminist and civil rights movements in Los Angeles, much of May Sun’s work reflects a deep and methodical preoccupation with history and culture. In her studio practice as well as her public art practice, her Chinese ancestry and contemporary, multicultural American existence have proven to be especially rich terrain for exploration and discovery in her work. Sun has also intentionally embraced the histories and personal narratives of other communities of color and immigrant and native communities, seeking to elucidate the little-known past against erasure.

A three-month residency in Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France, prompted her to reconsider the beauty and power of nature; it proffered a challenge to her surrounded-by-concrete life as a city-dweller. This reverie of the natural world has become a primary lens through which to experience the world, and elements of this deep appreciation for nature have appeared in her work ever since.

Such is true in her new work in her ruminations on home as a place of belonging–replete with a kind of visceral beauty, a space of ritual and respite marked by the changing of the seasons, the cornerstone of what was once the American Dream now unattainable, and a more obscene iteration: a commodity of extraordinary luxury, a disavowal of the basic human right to shelter. As an established professional artist struggling to maintain financial stability and as a citizen witness to Los Angeles’ exploding homeless population, Sun’s thoughts on the subject of home are tinged with the worry of housing insecurity that so many artists face, the precarious balance many of us are so desperate to strike in order to keep a roof over our heads and those of our loved ones, and the enviable, unfettered emancipation that comes from moving freely through the world like the birds who nestle in the artist’s backyard. Sun loves the birds who cohabitate on the property she rents; they enjoy the simplest of life’s pleasures, and their only currency is to live with purpose and intention.

Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, May Sun received her B.A. in Art (Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts) from UCLA and an MFA in Sculpture at Otis College of Art and Design. Her oeuvre includes the broad range of the visual arts, from painting, photography, and video to performance and large-scale mixed media installation, as well as major public art projects throughout Los Angeles and across the country. She has taught at California Institute for the Arts, Otis, and other art schools and colleges across the US, and recently served as artist in residence at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland from 2017-2018.

 

Artist Statement

The Times in L.A./The Meaning of Home

My current house is a small bungalow with a small studio in the back garden. The garden is home to many birds, and regular visitors include hummingbirds, orioles, mockingbirds and scrub jays. It’s the most rooted place I have ever lived, having moved and lived in various apartments previously.

My parents immigrated twice, the first time leaving China for Hong Kong, the second time to the United States. Los Angeles is as close to a home as I’ll ever have. I don’t own my house, and on a hot summer day I went to Home Depot to feel the air conditioning. I saw wood and laminate wood floors on sale and fantasized about replacing our carpeted floors with the wood. Realizing you could take samples of each floor, I took several and thought I could make an art project with them.

I still read the Los Angeles Times, the physical paper, every morning. Every day there are stories about the expanding homeless population, their needs, their trials and tribulations, living on the streets, in tents and in shelters. Every other day there are photos of families being separated at the border and families being tearfully reunited, all because they wanted an opportunity to live in a safe country.

Every weekend in the Hot Property and View magazines, there are exclusive luxury listings for houses that cost $25,500,000 and houses that rent for $65,000 a month. There are “spectacular compounds” where you can “live above the stars,” there are “high-class hideaways,” and there is a “curated collection of premier properties” where if you own one of them, you can show visitors that “sophistication and style know no boundaries.”

What is the meaning of home? Would you pay $65,000 a month to rent a spectacular house even if you can afford it? Do you think that all homeless people are drug addicts and that that they bring it on to themselves? Do you know how easy it is to be evicted if you don’t have steady income and you have an unforgiving landlord? Do you know how many people live in their cars? Do you know how many artists have had to leave

their buildings where they live and work because developers have bought those buildings and are renovating and tripling the rents so that non artists can live in an artsy environment?

Birds nest in trees, forage for food to feed their young and themselves. They fly high in the sky, and can escape danger most of the time by taking off with their wings. When I see the birds in my garden, I realize they have a home here, and they never have to worry about being homeless, or coming up with a billion dollars to live “above the stars.”

May Sun

September 2018

 

Art Salon Chinatown, a program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

 

Realm is located in Chinatown Central Plaza at 425 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Open Wednesday through Monday 12-6:00 PM, Closed Tuesday

Milton Quon Celebrates 105

Milton Quon was born 105 years ago today. He’s a happily married man of more than 70 years to Peggy, with four kids, and four grandsons. For decades, he worked in the commercial arts to provide for his family, and made art on the side to cultivate himself. He is a pioneering Chinese American artist, and Art Salon Chinatown celebrates our extraordinary friend today on his special day. Happy 105th birthday, Milton!

Milton Quon and family at Art Salon Chinatown opening of his exhibit, June 2018. ©TheMinistryOfCulture.com

Art Salon Chinatown Presents Kris Chau

The Ministry of Culture is pleased to present the fourth Art Salon Chinatown exhibition featuring Los Angeles artist Kris Chau. The exhibition will be on view through September 17, 2018.

“Making my own mythology helps me deal with my own darkness and light, polarity, duality, relationships, and the world. Folklore is a way of explaining the unexplainable.”

Kris Chau is a Los Angeles-based visual artist and clothing designer from Hawaii. As Chinese refugees from Vietnam, her parents could not pinpoint the source of their daughter’s creative talent nor explain her insatiable curiosity. In middle school, Chau was an awkward girl with glasses, subject to bullying, but her draftsmanship skills soon became evident amongst her peers. She copied imagery from comics and mastered the horse illustrations in a Chinese brush painting book her grandpa gave her. She produced drawings of superheros and cartoon characters on request for fellow students and teachers. Breaking with her parents’ expectations, she left the island to study at the California College of Art and Crafts in Oakland, where major, merit-based, departmental scholarship awards enabled her to complete her BA in illustration.

Seeking another change of scenery and a new exploratory chapter following college, Chau moved to Philadelphia. Resigned to a life of poverty as an artist, she worked ordinary day jobs to make ends meet. She soon developed a legitimate side business of freelance art projects from around the country. Then came an extraordinary opportunity: Free People hired her to work as a clothing designer despite her lack of any formal training for the vocation. The owner of the company fell in love with Chau’s art work and hired her outright, so her mundane existence as an ostensibly starving artist took a decidedly different turn: a lucrative, new career path.  

Chau continued to place a premium on her studio practice, even as it was relegated to her personal time. She continued to supplement her full-time work with projects and assignments that nurtured her artmaking, even a short stint teaching fashion design illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

After having sidelined her studio practice since her college years in Oakland, Chau took a leap of faith, quit her corporate job of nine years, and moved to Los Angeles in 2015 so that she could dedicate herself to her art making. The risk proved worthwhile: Chau has been busy producing new bodies of work ever since, accompanied by a steady stream of private commissions as well as commercial projects locally and elsewhere. She also established her own artist-driven clothing line and co-founded a small but popular design studio in Chinatown, called Day Space Night.

Her classical art training and commercial art chops notwithstanding, Chau thinks of herself as a folk artist. She explores existential questions, often personal yet universal, in her work, framed in a visual language that is equal parts cosmology, art and folklore from antiquity to the present, comics, and story books. In fact, Chau cites potent and efficient story telling devices in ancient Egyptian and milennia-old Japanese artistic traditions as chief among her inspirations. Modern and contemporary artists who translate their visions across a wide range of mediums and formats have also deeply influenced her work. Chau’s artistry draws from Ruth Asawa’s grace, Louise Bourgeois’s grit, Alexander Girard’s playful yet disciplined design, Sonia Delaunay’s energetic patterns, and Hilma af Klint’s cosmological quest.

Uninterested in fame or glory, Chau describes her purpose of being an artist is to inspire connectedness and understanding, to make images that help people feel less lonely or misjudged.

She says, “My artmaking is the sails on my boat. It has taken me around the world, it is my inner compass, my flare signal.” And she insists that her draftsmanship is her currency: “It is a language that I’ve learned to speak. As long as I’m drawing for the rest of my life, that’s good enough.”

 

Art Salon Chinatown, a program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

RSVP/Join the email list here:

 

Art Salon Chinatown Presents Milton Quon

June 9 – July 30, 2018

Realm, Chinatown Central Plaza, Los Angeles

Milton Quon is a native of Los Angeles, born in 1913. As the eldest of eight children and the only son of the Ng Quan Ying family, he grew up near and worked at his father’s produce business in Market Chinatown, where the Los Angeles Produce Market is located in downtown.

Quon’s talent was apparent at a young age. When it came time for him to go to college and choose a career, Quon entered Frank Wiggins Trade School (what would become Los Angeles Trade-Tech College) and Los Angeles Junior College as an architecture major so that he could take art classes while preparing for a practical, lucrative profession. He soon switched his major to art and won Chouinard Art Institute’s summer scholarship in 1936–the first of many he would receive from the school that would later become the California Institute of the Arts.

Milton Quon’s professional career began with Walt Disney Studios in 1939, helping animate the films Fantasia and Dumbo. With the studio’s strike of 1941, Quon soon entered the world of freelance work, illustrating everything from advertisements for Douglas Aircraft missiles and Laura Scudder mayonnaise to restaurant menus and chopstick instructions for Chinatown’s own Man Jen Low, Soo Chow, and Grandview Gardens, among others. He returned to Disney after the war to create promotional art on projects and films, like Make Mine Music and Song of the South. He went on to become the first Chinese West Coast art director for the ad agency BBD&O, where he managed national accounts. Beyond normal business hours, Quon ran his own Mid-City Art Service, preparing illustrations, layouts, and presentation materials for clients. Quon also shared his creative talent as an instructor at Los Angeles Trade Tech College. As a commercial artist and art director, Quon drew on a broad artistic range that enabled him to fulfill the needs of his clients.

Later in his career and throughout his retirement, Quon continued his art education through informal means. He attended weekend watercolor workshops and classes and returned to painting for pleasure, especially on location, learning and bonding with other watercolor artists, such as Milford Zores, Dong Kingman, Robert E. Wood, and Henry Fukuhara. Quon also added to the thousands of sketches of his native Los Angeles by recording in great detail his recreational travels. An opulent Chinese opera, the symphony at Carnegie Hall, a young tree next to a secret fishing spot, and quotidien scenes were all sketched in haste and depicted in the same vein: with a balance of formal economy, composition geared for maximum impact, and a sensitivity to the most important details, such as mood and sensory information.

Quon rarely exhibited his art work prior to his retirement. Over the last two decades, he has had exhibitions and worked as a movie and television extra. After many years of making art for others, it is not surprising that sales of his works are not a priority for Quon with regard to his own fine art practice. He prefers to collect his paintings, much like his approach to sketchbooking. In May of 2005, Quon enjoyed his first major solo museum exhibition, Impressions: Milton Quon’s Los Angeles at the Chinese American Museum.

The works in the exhibition are but a small selection from Quon’s own extensive collection. His plein-air watercolors and sketchbooks, with their rich, intuitive colors and expressive lines, form the basis of Quon’s fine art practice. The artist’s oeuvre is replete with hometown glory: his pictures chronicle everyday life against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s changing natural and urban landscape.

 

Milton Quon, Nov. 2017 Photo © Shervin Shahbazi

Milton will celebrate his 105th birthday in August.

Special thanks to Milton and his wife of more than 70 years, Peggy, and their four children, Michael, Jeffrey, Timothy, and Sherrill.

Excerpts of this text were drawn from the exhibition description of Impressions: Milton Quon’s Los Angeles and the main essay from the exhibition catalogue, entitled ‘Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles, both of which were authored by this curator, Sonia Mak.

Realm is located at 425 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Art Salon Chinatown, a new program series of solo exhibitions and accompanying artist talks is presented by The Ministry of Culture, and is organized by curators Sonia Mak and Shervin Shahbazi. The salon takes place at Realm, located in Los Angeles Chinatown’s historic Central Plaza, with the primary focus of showcasing contemporary Chinese American and Asian American artists.

LA’s Artist & Craftsman Art Supply Donation

Art Salon Chinatown would like to thank Artist & Craftsman Supply in downtown Los Angeles for their donation of art supplies for Greetings from Chinatown event on Sunday April 15th. Special thanks to Rosalee Bernabe at ACS for her kindness and assistance.

Artist & Craftsman Supply Store is located at 1917-1921 E 7th St, Los Angeles, CA 90023.