| Dong Kingman | ||
| Birth Date: March 31, 1911 |
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| Death Date: May 12, 2000 Artist Gallery |
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| Kingman’s father, Dong Chun-Fei, a farmer who could never quite adjusted to city living, came to Toishan, a district in Kwang-Tung in the hills of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. His mother found time to paint while raising eight children. Kingman recalls that “Every day for a year she painted a bird in a bamboo tree, then tired of it and painted another bird in another tree every day for another year.” They moved to California in 1900.
Dong Kingman, christened Tsang King-man, was born in Oakland, California , in 1911. When he was five his family returned to Hong Kong where he attended the Lingnan Grammar School. The headmaster, Sze-To Wai, who had studied painting in Paris, realized the capabilities of his new student to teach him perspective by taking his student on outings in Hong Kong’s Happy Valley to sketch.
His father sent him back to Oakland, and at the age of eighteen he worked in a garment factory, later bought a restaurant for $75.00, which he lost when the roof caved in, and then became a houseboy for a local family. Through all of this Kingman went to school in the morning, worked in the afternoon and evening – and painted in his spare time.
In 1935, Kingman’s first one-man show in the San Francisco Art Center was held and the exhibit was considered a success. We worked in the W.P.A. Project for five years earning ninety dollars a month. In 1941 he received a $5,000.00 Guggenheim Fellowship which permitted him to travel throughout the United States painting. With the outbreak of World War II Kingman was sent to Camp Beal in California and then to Washington, D.C. to make charts and graphs for the Office of Strategic Services.
In 1954 the United States State Department, as part of its educational and exchange program, invited him to go on a world tour to “sell” democracy. This he did and Kingman became known as the five-foot all American.
Kingman worked solely in watercolors probably due to the fact that in one art school which he attended briefly, an instructor saw his oil paintings and told Kingman that he would fail as an artist. Kingman’s watercolors, however, made the instructor change his mind. Kingman never painted in oils again. His trademark is his watercolors of great cities around the world.
In a letter the Museum sent to Mr. Kingman in 1993, the questions was asked how to do you feel about your art? Kingman’s answer: Still developing…
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