In the Hollywood version of Tyrus Wong’s life, a young boy arrives by steamship (SS China) to U.S. shores, stays at Angel Island, is discovered in art school, makes a name for himself, and is covered in glory.
Karen Fang’s Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (2025) tells a grittier version. Look Get, Tyrus Wong’s father, first arrived to the U.S. in 1898.
He spent a large amount of his own savings to send for his son, Tyrus, in 1920, when the boy was 10. Some of the cost went to papers for this “paper son,” who had to memorize the facts of other’s lives in order to get past immigration officials. Born Wong Gen Yeo, Tyrus arrived at the U.S. with papers as Look Tai Yow. (He was later dubbed “Tyrus” by a teacher because “Tai Yow” was seen as hard-to-pronounce.)
Stepping onto the steamship to America would be the last that the boy would see of his mother and other relatives left behind on the mainland, due in part to the prohibitory laws regarding re-entry after travel abroad for non-citizens in the U.S. The U.S. was in the grip of anti-Chinese and xenophobic sentiments, which were codified into discriminatory laws. Another hurdle to travel had to do with the distance halfway around the world, a month’s travel by ship, and inordinate costs.
Wong’s start in art seems to have been through dabbling. His father, a former merchant, wanted his son to learn Chinese ink painting and had him train by painting with water on old newspapers. The father by then was working to mend shoes at a shoe store. It is unclear whether the father had formal training in calligraphy or ink painting. Perhaps the effort was aspirational. And yet, the son responded to his father’s hopes for him.
The father lived an itinerant lifestyle in pursuit of work and left Tyrus to his own devices for various stints. Tyrus used the lack of parental oversight to skip school and was expelled for his high absenteeism. His father brought him down to Los Angeles to where his father could keep an eye on him. It was unclear if there was much of a support community for him, even as Tyrus came from a society in which children are expected to grow up fast. His talent for the visual arts was seen early, and he was accepted into the Otis Art Institute, where his rough talent was honed into a commercial skillset. This institute is also where he met many creative notables of his day and made some lifelong friends.
This biography follows Tyrus in his courtship of Ruth Kim, an American-born Chinese and UCLA graduate. Then follows his career in the creative hothouse of Los Angeles, with the WPA and then film companies and a card company.
Throughout the text are reprints of some of his wide-ranging work. A middle colored insert shows many of his more notable works: “Winter Landscape,” “Winter Blossoms,” “Tree of Fantasy,” “Christmas Kitten,” “The Perfect Tree,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and a Chinese Jesus (made for a church). The works read of skill, but not an official artist catalog, more lowbrow culture than highbrow.
Karen Fang’s knowledge of film enhances the biography. She writes that sketches had to “work in conjunction with architectural blueprints for set designs. Often these detailed sketches required special mathematical formulas used to map the distance of camera to subject, or to properly reflect the dimensions of the set…His calligraphic training and favorite medium of fast-drying opaque watercolor were ideally suited to motion picture sketches, as they enabled Tyrus to quickly put out legible, evocative scenes and convincingly render human movement.”
One major problem-solving feat seems to have launched Tyrus Wong’s career in film and animation:
Bambi wasn’t working. The teams of accomplished artists that Walt had imported from Europe for their skill at depicting fairy-tale enchantment were helpless at depicting the young deer’s natural world. The studio was hemorrhaging money, photographing deer antlers from all angles, and subsidizing months of research by a Maine-based naturalist. A menagerie of live baby forest critters acquired to help the animators study animal movement and realism kept maturing and needing replacement as the film project stalled.
At that time, Tyrus had only a few weeks’ experience in animation. So what are some takeaways from Tyrus Wong’s life? Perhaps one is that immigration is an important leavening for an economy, bringing in original talent that can be honed for commercial viability. Perhaps it is that structural racism can raise barriers to human actualization (and systemic and societal growth). Perhaps it is that talent has its own currency and can open narrow paths to success.
Perhaps it is that a democratic system can enable space for hard work, social networking, and skill—even in the face of widespread racial discrimination. As Fang tells it, his is the exceptional life that proves the rule—that many were kept down because of race:
Tyrus, a nonwhite immigrant who lived in the United States for ninety-six years—longer than most people’s lifespans—endured the consequences of these troubled categories (fine vs. commercial arts, Eastern vs. Western aesthetics). Despite his longevity in the United States and his lifetime of contributions to American visual culture, his thick accent and the circumstances of his immigration complicated his identity and status. It caused him and his work to be overlooked or seen as foreign for decades.
Perhaps it is that progressives can provide necessary hands-up for aspirants to the American Dream. Perhaps it is that chance and coincidences are decisive factors in human lives.
Not everyone with talent will have their moment in the sun or will be seen as history-worthy. A child of Hollywood, Wong was a “packrat” with his art. He documented his life in many ways, and he participated in various documentary projects in his later years sharing about his life and experiences. In his self-memoir work, he was assisted in the archives kept by the corporations and a wartime government office (Disney, Warner Bros., Hallmark, WRA) he worked for.
A solid and illuminating work, Background Artist was written with a large amount of support by Tyrus’ family, namely his three daughters, Kay, Tai-Ling, and Kim. It is unclear if the family had edit oversight on the text. While Karen Fang, Professor of English at the University of Houston, documents the sources of her information assiduously, the work would benefit from more of a sense of Tyrus Wong’s personality and person without a PR sheen. What were his deep-held values? Which artists and art schools had the most influence on him?
It is debatable whether he had a unique artist hand in the sense of a fine artist or if he had a draftsman’s problem-solving hand tailoring solutions to commercial art problems. There is a sense that he is one of thousands of “extras” that helped tell stories on the big screen and would not be the subject of a biography but for his origins and his advocates. His art is from a particular time, and that time has now been supplanted by generative AI, digital visual technologies, more modern media, more techniques, and different aesthetics.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
