Dong Kingman

Artist and educator

• Born: March 31, 1911
• Birthplace: Oakland, California
• Died: May 12, 2000
• Place of death: New York City

Dong Kingman is considered the foremost Asian American watercolorist of the twentieth century. His paintings, which are imbued with both Eastern and Western sensibilities, have been collected by dozens of museums, while his work for the film industry has been archived by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Birth name: Dong Moy Shu

Areas of achievement: Art, education

Early Life

Dong Moy Shu Kingman was born Dong Moy Shu in Oakland, California, the second of eight children born to Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. In 1916, his father moved the family back to Hong Kong to avoid being caught up in World War I. When Dong was enrolled in school, his teacher, noticing the five-year-old’s interest in art, gave him the name King-man, which means scenery (King) and composition (man). He adopted the name Kingman as his given name and kept Dong as his family name and wrote it in the traditional Chinese style, with the family name first, as Dong Kingman. Although he kept writing his name this way, he later began using Dong as his given name and Kingman as his family name.

In school, Kingman learned the traditional Chinese arts of calligraphy and watercolor painting. One of his greatest influences was Szeto Wai, the Paris-trained director of the Lingnan Academy in China. Szeto Wai took Kingman under his wing and taught him techniques of French impressionism and other Western styles of art in addition to traditional Chinese styles.

Kingman returned to Oakland in his teens and supported himself by working in a variety of menial positions. When he had saved enough money, he attended the Fox Morgan Art School. After trying his hand at oil painting, Kingman returned to watercolors. He excelled in this medium and began to draw attention throughout the San Francisco Bay area before reaching national stature in the mid-1930s. From 1936 to 1941, he also participated as an artist in the Works Progress Administration and taught at the Academy of Advertising Art in San Francisco.

Life’s Work

In 1940, Kingman sold A Morning Picture (1939) to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first of three acquisitions. Two years later, he was awarded the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships to travel and paint scenes around the country. He included some of these paintings in his first solo exhibit on the East Coast, at Midtown Galleries in New York City in 1942. By this time, he was considered one of the country’s foremost watercolorists. During World War II, he joined the United States Army as a cartographer. Stationed in Washington, DC, he continued to paint in his free time.

After the war, Kingman moved to Brooklyn Heights in New York and taught art at Columbia University (1946–58) and at Hunter College (1948–53). In 1953, he joined the faculty of the Famous Artists School in Westport, Connecticut, alongside Norman Rockwell, Ben Shahn, Will Barnet, and other major American artists.

In 1954, Kingman served as an educational ambassador in Asia for the US State Department. His tour of duty took him to Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul, New Delhi, and other locations. He also visited many European cities on his way home, setting up his easel wherever he went. When he returned to New York, Life magazine reproduced portions of his forty-foot rice-paper scroll of international urban scenes.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Kingman worked in the film industry as an artist or technical adviser on over three hundred films, including The World of Suzie Wong (1960), Flower Drum Song (1961), and 55 Days in Peking (1963). In 2000, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented a special posthumous exhibition, Dong Kingman: An American Master in Hollywood.

In 1981, as diplomatic relations between the United States and China were resuming, Kingman was the first American artist invited to exhibit his paintings in Beijing by China’s Ministry of Culture. His popularity in Asia has remained high ever since, with several major retrospective exhibitions held in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and other locations.

Kingman’s work has been collected by nearly five dozen museums and institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. His many awards include the American Watercolor Society’s highest honor, the Dolphin Medal (1987), the Art Institute of Chicago’s International Watercolor Exhibition Award (1941), the Metropolitan Museum of Art Award (1953), and an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco (1987).

Kingman died of pancreatic cancer on May 12, 2000, at the age of eighty-nine. He survived two wives, Janice Wong, who died in 1954, and Helena Kuo, who died in 1999. He fathered two sons, Eddie and Dong Jr.

Significance

Dong Kingman was a master of watercolor painting and the foremost Asian American watercolorist of the twentieth century. A pioneer of the California style of painting, he later adapted his talents to meet the needs of government, commercial art, and the film industry, while also continuing to find success in the world of fine art. His work continues to inspire watercolor enthusiasts throughout the world.

Bibliography

Caen, Herb, and Dong Kingman. San Francisco, City on Golden Hills. Illus. Kingman. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967. Print. This collaboration of text and art, with dozens of color and black and white illustrations by Kingman, presents a unique mid-twentieth century portrait of the Bay City.

Kingman, Dong. Portraits of Cities. New York: Twenty-Second Century Film, 1997. Print. A retrospective of the artist’s life containing critical essays, photographs, and dozens of reproductions from Kingman’s film, commercial, and fine art.

Kingman, Dong, and Helene Kuo Kingman. Dong Kingman’s Watercolors. New York: Watson, 1980. Print. Offers illustrated step-by-step explanations of Kingman’s techniques.