#guandong

Photograph of Chinese American artist, Yun Gee (image 1), and Gee with other members of the Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club in San Francisco (image 2) in 1926. In the group photograph, Gee is modelling a bust of an Asian man while the other painters are at work on their canvases. 

The Artists’ club form in 1926 in San Francisco’s Chinatown and was composed of immigrants from Guangdong in their late teens and early 20s. Its headquarters, which also served as a studio, teaching centre, exhibition space, and possibly shared bedroom, was located in an upper room at 150 Wetmore Place. Its membership fluctuated during its 15 or so years of existence but probably had a dozen members at any given time. Its most famous members were co-founder and leader Yun Gee, and Eva Fong Chan (1897-1991) who became a member in the early 1930s and was the only woman known to be part of the Club. Unlike Fong, who was a former beauty queen turned piano teacher and received an education, the young men of the Club were working-class and probably held menial jobs such as servants, cooks, dishwashers, and launderers. The Club was devoted to learning, experimenting, and teaching the techniques of modernist oil painting and the latest Parisian styles, while taking the street scenes, peoples, and objects of Chinatown as subject matter. Little of the painters’ works survives.