Exhibitions

May 16, 2024–October 27, 2024 The Portland Chinatown Museum presents BONG WAI CHEN: Reframing Tradition, a retrospective on the art and life of Portland Chinatown artist Bong Wai Chen (1911-1968), who influenced a generation of Oregon artists and through his practice of Chinese art and calligraphy. This exhibition is the third of a series of retrospectives organized by Portland Chinatown Museum and curator Roberta May Wong to recognize the legacies and cultural contributions of Portland’s Chinese American artists.

Extensively trained in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting from a very young age, Bong Wai Chen was already a prize-winning artist and art teacher in China when he moved to the U.S. in 1936. While earning a B.S. in architectural engineering and a M.A. in California, Chen married and started a family, eventually becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. And like many immigrant artists, he began to alter his artistic goals and reframe his artistic practice in response to his new life and to accommodate U.S. audiences unfamiliar with the principles and ideals of Chinese art.

In Portland, Chen during the 1950s became revered as an influential authority on Chinese painting and calligraphy – teaching, making and exhibiting his art, delivering lectures on the theory and practice of Chinese art, and providing demonstrations for schools and cultural organizations. Chen’s artistic legacy in Portland grew when he opened the Chinese Art Studio in 1960, where he taught countless students and painted the landscapes, birds, butterflies and flowers incorporated into his exquisite calligraphy of classic Chinese poetry. In addition to students from Portland’s Chinatown, Chen also taught Portlanders of the 1960’s counterculture interested in Asian philosophy and art, such as Reed College professor Lloyd Reynolds who later popularized italic calligraphy in the U.S. This exhibition traces the classically-trained Chinese artist’s journey of innovation as he adapted to his new life in Portland, Oregon, and thrived.

Learn more about Bong Wai Chen through our Chinatown Live! oral history project. Click here to view a family oral history of Bong Wai Chen's art and legacy.

Images:
(Top) Bong Wai Chen and Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College demonstration, 1965. Photo courtesy of Reed College Archives.

(Inset) Bong Wai Chen, Mountain Waterfall, ink on paper, 42 in. x 23.5 in. From the collection of Sabrina and Anthony Lozano, courtesy of Salvador and Antonia Lozano.