Art: Dashing Realist

Bouncy, buck-toothed little Dong Kingman, a California-born Chinese, has meandered over much of the U.S., recording in bright, breezy brush strokes the look of the land. In the course of his visual reporting he has whipped out about 50 pictures a year, and sold most of them at an average of $250 apiece.

Last week, at San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, his home town got a look at 64 deftly slapdash Dong watercolors. One standout was a gay gull’s-eye view of San Francisco’s war-crowded harbor (see cut). To get a proper perch to paint it from, Dong pitched a pup tent dizzily atop the Bay Bridge. It was a long way up from the narrow obscurity of San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he began.

Sidewalk Start. When Dong was five years old, his American-born father got tired of running a hand laundry, moved the family to Hong Kong. There he ran a successful department store while Dong chalked his early works on the sidewalk out front.

They looked good to his father, who packed Dong off to Hong Kong’s Lingnan Academy to learn about art. The headmaster, who had studied in Paris, took Dong under his wide-sleeved wing, taught him both Oriental Hsieh-yi (“to draw a conception”) and occidental Hsieh-cheng (“to draw reality”). Dong inclined toward Hsieh-cheng.

At 18, he returned to the U.S., worked two years in an overall factory, sank $75 in a restaurant which flopped because he spent more time painting than cooking. In 1936, after a spell as a houseboy, he began painting in earnest on a $94-a-month WPA grant.

All-American. Critics who look for oriental innuendoes in Dong’s bright colors and brash brushwork can trace his work back to China’s 1,400-year-old tradition of sacrificing detail to get the “rhythmic vitality” of a scene.

But Dong is, and counts himself, All-American. Since April, as an Army private, he has been doing secret plainclothes work for the cloak-&-dagger Office of Strategic Services. On furloughs he returns to his apartment just off Nob Hill and his pretty Chinese-American wife. He sometimes wears a blue mandarin coat but also likes loud sports jackets.

Of his free way of painting what he sees, Dong has a characteristic western explanation: “Nature is really very messy. It is the artist’s job to straighten it out.”