by Kay Curry
Northwest Asia Weekly
Victor Kai Wang uses a Chinese brush to mark ink on Formica boards. The background is Victor’s painting “Crystal Rainbow”. (Courtesy: Wang Kai Family)
Few artists have dedicated their lives to art. Serious art. There is no noticeable pause,
Picasso comes to mind. Victor Kai Wang (王凯) is another. Nothing stopped Victor from pursuing his art – not the Cultural Revolution in China. Not starting from scratch in Seattle.
“If you have your ‘why,’ you can live with almost any ‘how,'” said Victor’s eldest son, Will Wang Graylin, paraphrase philosopher and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl.
Victor’s “why” is his passion for art and its preciousness as a tool of expression.
“My dad knew from a very young age…he wanted to be an artist,” Will shared. “He followed his passion until last year, when he was 87,” at which point Victor suffered a stroke. He’s on the mend now, finally retiring and living in Boston with Will.
“Passion: Hidden,” 1992, by Victor Kai Wang
Victor is like the old literati painters of the Song Dynasty, who often faced exile because of the unpredictable political situation. From the age of 7, Victor followed his passion. His father, a bank president who was later persecuted to death as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution, found Victor to be the best teacher in Western and Chinese art. At the age of 15, Victor lied about his age to enter the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA). And, without a doubt, talent.
In the same company as China’s greatest contemporary artists, Victor lives, breathes and teaches art. He was married to Diana, a talented ballet dancer, a half-American who helped found ballet schools in Shanghai and Guangdong. Life is good.
Victor works hard – very hard.
“He was essentially a devotion to his craft,” recalls Victor’s youngest son, Alvin W. Graylin. A documentary on Victor’s life made at Weill “theme In Variations”, Alvin describes his walk through GAFA’s father’s office.
“He’s been studying, he’s been reading. You can see his shadow through the curtain.” At the time, Western art was not readily available in China, so Victor took great pains to reproduce the great works of art in Europe so that he and his students benefit. There aren’t many textbooks at school, so he made his own study guides, translating English books into Chinese.
Wang Kai, Bowing and Stretching, 1993.
Then came the Cultural Revolution. Scholars are under pressure to adhere to Chairman Mao’s ideals. Their livelihoods are often deprived. Diana found herself going from being a brilliant ballerina who helped start the Shanghai Ballet, one of the first Russian-trained ballet companies in China, to closing her ballet school. Due to the long history of the Wang (Wang) family in China (their family tree dates back to 94 BC to 605 BC, including a member of the Zhou dynasty) and Victor’s “right-wing” banker father, Victoria Keto and Diana were designated as “heavy-educational” as part of the Cultural Revolution.
When the couple and their 1-year-old son Will were sent to a rural labor camp, they lived in a makeshift house converted from a chicken coop. Will noted in the documentary that his mother was labeled a “516 Revolutionary” and imprisoned. She was released from prison only to give birth to Alvin. This led to Diana’s severe post-traumatic stress disorder and ultimately the breakdown of her marriage to Victor a decade later.
During the Cultural Revolution, Wang Kai, his wife Diana, and their sons Will and Alvin were reunited as a family and allowed to stay in the same re-education camp. According to Victor’s sons, bicycles are their only material possessions. (Courtesy: Wang Kai Family)
While at the camp, Victor was officially banned from creating—but he persevered, painting with rice bags as canvases in his spare time on the farm. Diana recalled in the documentary that Victor never saw their situation as “abuse”. Instead, he used the opportunity to learn how to be a good farmer so he could “express the farmer’s life”.
Victor has always had a pragmatic and optimistic approach to life and his responsibilities. In 1980, after the Cultural Revolution, Diana’s uncle and cousin helped the family immigrate to Seattle, and Victor had to relocate in the new land. He worked hard to support his family, washing dishes or painting storefront signs and windows, affording a one-bedroom apartment and putting food on the table.
Like the Song painters, the re-education camps were a form of exile. Coming to America was another form – but Victor and Diana chose to give their son a better life.
When Diana’s PTSD flared up again shortly after arriving in the U.S. and had to be hospitalized, Victor took on the responsibility of raising the boy alone. Victor has had some success with color correction work in Yuen Lui’s studio. He gets along well with his masters and is able to use discarded photographic paper to devise a completely new technique, one based on his academic, traditional Chinese and Western training, but with new materials and a new visual aesthetic. He called it marker color.
The Weekly asked Will and Alvin what qualifies one person—their father—to be a great artist. For Will, “It’s a lifelong pursuit and expression driven by a sense of purpose beyond oneself, beauty from within.” For Alvin, “A great artist is someone who can bring new forms, new mediums to life. … and use that form to express themselves and impact audiences in ways they’ve never seen before.”
Victor was never commercialized. Although he briefly owned a gallery and sold his art, he declined this path because he didn’t want to be bound by anyone’s opinion of what he should paint – he didn’t want to spend his time copying himself instead of innovation. When he graduated from Alvin University, the calligraphy master Victor gave him a painting of the word “success”, and for Victor, the painting was not about money, but about beauty – in and around you . Only recently has Victor heated up again, encouraged by his sons, to share his art openly. In the spirit of a traditional Chinese artist, he always does so at home, or through donations, but rarely through sales. You can see his work in the current Wing Luke “Repositioning” exhibition, and hopefully, through other live or digital means in the near future.
A great artist uses his heart and mind. His art makes you think, but also feel. From traditional Chinese landscapes to Western portraiture to abstraction in Marking Color to a new approach to photo and digital art he has been experimenting with, which he calls “New Song” – Victor’s art incorporates all of these – — and beauty.
In the documentary, Victor and Will sit on a Washington Beach bench. They saw a solitary tree, which inspired Victor’s painting “Bow and Stretch”. “Submit to the forces of nature, but don’t yield,” Victor told his son. “Continue to grow and grow.” Victor commented on how the tree “suffered” like himself, despite the changing circumstances. “The most important thing is beauty,” Wang Kai said. “If you want to paint a beautiful picture, you have to be beautiful on the inside. The picture on the outside shows beauty. [But] This beauty comes not only from nature, but also from the heart. “
Some of Victor Kai Wang’s works can be viewed at pinemoongallery.com/aboutus or in the “Reorientation” exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum (wingluke.org/exhibit-reorient).Wang Grayling’s documentary on Victor will be in vimeo.com/manage/videos/172977552.
Kay can reach info@nwasianweekly.com.
