Meeting of East & West

Manhattan gallerygoers were treated to some surprising new views of their city last week. In an exhibition of brush drawings and watercolors by a bouncy little Chinese-American artist named Dong Kingman, they found a strange but somehow convincing version of the place. Kingman had painted bits of the town from Central Park to the Battery, making most of his sketches on Sundays and working from half-concealed positions behind garbage cans and in doorways so as not to attract attention. "Sometimes a crowd would gather anyway," Kingman says, "and I'd have to drive them away by singing Chinese songs--very hard on the ears."

Born in the U.S., Kingman was taken to Hong Kong at the age of five, returned at 18 and went to work in a California overall factory. When the overall business palled, he did a hitch as a houseboy and another in a Chinese restaurant. Finally the WPA came along and gave him a chance to paint fulltime, started him toward becoming a bang-up success with his brush (TIME, Sept. 3, 1945). Since his discharge from the Army, where he served as a private in the OSS in Washington, he has been living in Brooklyn and teaching at Columbia and Hunter College.

One Way Up. His new paintings are his best yet. Kingman composed each one as elaborately as a Chinese puzzle, lit them with hectic dabs and flashes of bright color, and peopled them with wistful or sometimes sinister figures that seemed to hover uncertainly about the edges of his pictures, like the onlookers that interrupted his work. The paintings are crammed with signs reading Coffee Coffee Coffee, Goat, or ABCDEFGHIJK, and with crooked street lamps, unlikely stoplights, and one-way signs that often as not point straight up or down.

"I put all that in for fun," Kingman explains. "If people take my work too seriously, I'm disappointed. Of course, my pictures are sarcastic too. I mean, the signs say 'Go Here, Go There' when you don't really have to, and on Sundays, when there's no traffic, the stoplights keep on blinking as if they were crazy. Don't you feel that way?"

Halfway Back. The sarcasm is more friendly than biting, for Kingman takes a naive delight in U.S. ways. He keeps the radio in his studio going constantly ("It softens my mind and helps me paint. I know all about Luncheon at Sardi's and Heigh-ho, Silver!"), and all through dinner he watches television programs with his wife and two children. "To Chinese people," he says, "football is very queer, but I like to go and see the games. Also, I play bridge once a week."

At 38, Kingman's thoughts are turning eastward again. "Everyone writes that my work is half East and half West," he says, "that I'm in between. I don't know, I just want to be myself. Sometimes I dream I'm in Hong Kong; I want to go back and see if the dream is right."

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