Moo-Wee Tiam has not been found in the United States censuses, immigration and military records. His name may have been a pseudonym. Tiam’s first name had been spelled Moowee, Mowee, and Moo-Wee.
The New York Post, October 24, 1936, said
What became of Tiam is not known.
The New York Post, October 24, 1936, said
Chinese Art Club Holds Canal Street ExhibitThe New York Sun, April 27, 1937, said
Those who cherish the racial interpretation of art will find some matter to ponder in the exhibit by members of the Chinese Art Club in their new quarters at 175 Canal Street. For nine-tenths of the work shown is indistinguishable from contemporary occidental art.
Howard Low is most alert to advanced modern trends, creating abstract designs, lively drawings of city life, and intimate paintings like “Goldfish Bowl,” all very well done. Chu W. Young is an able exponent of impressionist landscape art, and Chu H. Jor paints still life with a soft patine of color. Others showing are Mowee Tiam, Harry Wong, Stanley Chin, Tschai Lanzene, K. L. Eng, Bennie Sonn and S. V. Pang.
City Artists Open Their ExhibitionThe New York Times, May 2, 1937, said
Preview of Display Given in Municipal Gallery
The twenty-second exhibition in the series arranged by the resident artists of New York city in the temporary galleries of the Municipal Art Committee, 62 West Fifty-third street, was opened with a preview this afternoon for the exhibiting artists and members of the Municipal Art Committee. The exhibition will open to the public tomorrow at noon and will continue through Sunday, May 16.
Four groups of artists are showing oil paintings of their own selection in the four galleries of the building. These groups are self-organized and applied for space for the exhibition and sale of their works without expense and without jury. The members of these groups are as follows.
Gallery 1—Ignatius Banasewicz, Aaron Fastovsky, Ben Galos, F. Wynn Graham, Gitel Kahn, Ragnar Olson, Emma Shumaker and Ted Witonski.
Gallery 2—William Cole Gray, Carolyn Haeberlin, Sally Mewhinney, Laura S. Parsons, Roslyn Reich, Roger Vernam and Mary Burton Wallis.
Gallery 3—Lucien Bildsteln, Eugene H. Bischoff, Paula Eliasoph, Rodney Lethbridge, S. L. Margolies, Albert A. Munro, Leslie H. Nash, Sara M. Pinkus, Malvina C. Slonin and Robert Zoeller.
Galleries 4 and 5—Salvatore Cannizzo, Stanley H. Chin, Frank Giovinazzo, Chu H. Jor, Nicholas Markatos, Irving H. Novick, Evangeline St. Clair and Moowee Tiam.
The temporary galleries are open daily including Sundays from 12 noon to 6 P. M. They are closed on Mondays. Admission is free.
Five of the Current Group ShowsThe New York Times, May 24, 1937, said
A reasonably modern tinge may be noted at the temporary galleries of the Municipal Art Committee, where the galleries on all four floors are occupied by oil paintings in the twenty-second exhibition of the series by resident New York artists. Thirty-three are represented in the four self-organized groups currently showing (until May 16). More than half of the artists have studied at the Art Students League. ...
... Three Chinese artists and two of Italian birth are exhibitors in Gallery IV. Chu Jor’s painstaking still-life study of textures, in vivid color, is inscribed to the memory of Gauguin. Moowee Tiam contributes a self-portrait which gives no warning of the other work from his brushes—“The Awakening,” suggesting something from the Book of Revelations.
Chinese Children Exhibit Art WorkThe Daily Worker (New York, New York), September 18, 1937, said
First Show Its Kind Contains Scarcely Anything That Is Oriental in Character
The Chinese Art Club at 175 Canal Street opened yesterday its first exhibition of art work by Chinese children. The odd thing about the show is that scarcely any of it is Chinese in character.
The gallery itself, with its white ceiling, walls covered with monks’ cloth and white shaded lights, is very up to date. And instead of drawing dragons, mandarins, pagodas and almond-eyed princesses, the children have drawn cowboys, Indians, airplanes and such characters from our comic strips as Buck Rogers, Dickie Dare, Mandrake the Magician and Mickey Mouse.
In fact, were it not for the thirty examples of Chinese handwriting by the elder children, the snatches of Chinese writing beside some of the drawings, and the series of fifteen realistic pencil drawings of modern Chinese warfare by 13-year-old Paul Chu—were it not for these, the exhibition might be the work of any group of American children.
The Chinese children have drawn what other American children draw—Vikings, Arthurian knights, court ladies of the eighteenth century, and Indians with feathered head-dresses.
All but ten or twelve of the young artists were born in this country. They have been taught drawing in their homes, the Chinese Public School and the Chinese Christian Kindergarten. Moowee Tiam of the club’s governing board, who was in charge yesterday, said that none had gone to the WPA free art classes.
There is only one mural in the show. It was painted by 10-year-old Cora May Chu and shows two girls playing on a greenware. To their left is the bough of a fruit tree in blossom. Behind them is a lake and a mountain. There are three pieces of clay modeling, twenty-nine paintings, and about 215 drawings.
Among the patrons of the show are Dr. Lin Yutang, Pearl S. Buck, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Dr. Tsune-Chi Yu, Chinese Consul General in New York.
The Art World
Dismissed WPA Chinese and Japanese Artists Express Unity in Paintings at ACA Gallery
The New York art season is getting under way. Galleries in the Champagne Belt are brushing the summer’s cobwebs from the ceiling corners and oiling the door hinges. Collectors, professional and amateur, have returned to the city. The critics have returned from their summer wanderings prepared, as far as adjectives are concerned, for whatever may befall them.
One gallery has kept the torch bright during the past months, spreading both heat and light. The A. C. A. Gallery, 52 West 8th Street, has been staunch in its support of the pink slip artists of The Federal Art Project, having given them three consecutive shows.
The current one is of great importance. Chinese and Japanese artists are exhibiting together, symbolizing their common persecution as aliens without the right to apply for citizenship in a more oblique way, but in a sharper manner, they represent the unity of the Chinese and the Japanese people against the Japanese war-machine.
Dismissed from Art Field
However, it is on the basis of their work as artists that this group presents its case. Victims of the most reprehensible type of legislative discrimination on WPA, they are in serious danger of being wiped out of the art field.
In his prefatory statement, Harry Gottlieb, president of the Artists’ Union, one of the sponsoring organizations, states the case simply, “As artists this group has made important contributions to our cultural life. They have exhibited in American museums and galleries. They are members of American artists organizations and are accepted as American artists. Their dismissal not only deprives the country of their talent, but in effect, denies their right to be artists.”
The exhibition’s level is high, with Chuzo Tamotzu and Yasuo Kuniyoshi representing the high water marks. Tamotzu’s “Jersey Station” is a sober harmony of greens and browns, with, a breath-taking freshness in the handling of the palette knife.
Kuniyoshi’s painting of a demimondaine in a wicker chair is as fine in its aristocratic greys and sensuous drawing as anything the artist has done which means that it is very fine indeed.
Eitaro Ishigaki devotes two pictures to the feats of the Basque women who hurled the Italian “volunteers” into the sea. Sakari Suzuki has three solidly constructed conceptions, ingratiatingly painted; C Yamasaki’s “Noonday Rest” is good solid painting with genuine feeling; Don Gook Wu’s “Unlovely Sunset” is wild Expressionism a la Orient; Thomas Nagai’s gouache and water colors are able renditions of mood and place.
Other exhibitors are Yosei Amemiya, Roy Kadowaki, Kaname Miyamoto, Fuji Nakamizo, Kiyoshi Shimisu, George Tera, Moo-Wee Tiam, Bunji Tagawa, Chu H. Jor and C. W. Young.
Tiam had four paintings in the exhibition, “The Russian Kettle”, “Still Life”, “The Chinese Seamen”, and “The Farm House”.
Chinese and Japanese ArtistsThe New York Post, November 20, 1937, said
While the minions of Mitsui and Mitsubishi are pouring death on China from the sea and air and the torn bodies of women and children writhe in the shattered cities, American reactionaries are conducting their own offensive against American Orientals. With the impartiality characteristic of American diplomacy, which goes in for “neutrality” measures like the current embargo against both imperialist Japan and bleeding China, the W.P.A. Administration has ruled all aliens off the projects. This includes, of course, all those who are prohibited by law from becoming citizens. Since only white aliens and those of African descent are eligible for citizenship, Asiatics find themselves on the proscribed list.
Japanese and Chinese artists have just concluded an exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery, welding in common persecution their collective desire to function as artists and Americans. Sponsored by the Artists Union, the Artists’ Congress and the Citizens’ Committee for Support of W.P.A., the exhibition indicated the contributions of the Chinese and Japanese to American culture.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, for instance, who is represented in many American museums as an American artist, and who was invited to the Carnegie International as an American, is a major influence in our art life. Not on W.P.A., Kuniyoshi sent one of his finest canvasses and several lithographs to the show as a gesture of solidarity with his brother artists and Orientals.
With W.P.A. support withdrawn and the chances of private patronage as remote as ever, these Japanese-American and Chinese-American artists are in serious danger of being eliminated from the art field, to say nothing of life itself. And, despite their great contribution to American culture, they will become the victims of reaction unless the liberal and progressive forces get busy and build a strong defense.
In the exhibition are the vibrant landscapes of Chuso Tamotsu, with “Jersey Station” and “Firetrap” outstanding in their quiet harmonies of green and brown: the anti-imperialist canvases of Eitaro Ishigaki, with two Spanish subjects of Basque women hurling Italian fascist “volunteers” into the sea; the sensitive water-colors and gouaches of Thomas Nagai; the socially symbolic montages of Sakari Suzuki; Don Gook Wu’s colorful impressionism and work by C. Yamasaki, Yosei Amemiya, Roy Kadowaki, Kaname Miyamoto, Fuji Nakamizo, Kiyoshi Shimisu, George Tera, Moo-Wee Tiam, Bunji Tagawa, Chu H. Jor and C. W. Young.
M. Tiam has been elected president of the Chinese Art Club, succeeding Chu H. Jor.Chinese Digest, December 1937, said
N.Y. Art Club Starts Painting Class
New York City — The Chinese Art club, 175 Canal street, which has sponsored many cultural and art activities among the Chinese here, has recently embarked on another activity which promises to bring out art talent and appreciation of Chinese art among Chinese and Americans alike.Chinese Digest, March 1938, said
This new activity is the engagement of Miss Yee Ching-chih, professor of Chinese painting at the Shanghai Art college. As instructor of Chinese art, Miss Yee has started a class in Chinese painting at the art club’s studios. Classes are being held three times a week, and a limited number of American students may be enrolled.
The Chinese Art club, in announcing this class, said, “This is the first time that such an opportunity to study Chinese art under an experienced native teacher … has ever been made possible in New York.”
This organization is now in its third year of existence and is about the most active one of its kind in the country. Last June it sponsored the first Chinese children’s art exhibition in America which attracted wide attention among American educators and art critics (Chinese Digest for July, 1937, p. 13). The club has an annual membership exhibition, sponsors native plays, and opens its studios for cultural gatherings of all kinds. Its present president is Moowee Tiam.
Art Club to Hold Painting and Photography ExhibitsThe New York Post, March 19, 1938, said
New York—The Chinese Art club here will hold its third annual exhibit of paintings and sculpture at the club’s gallery, 175 Canal street, beginning March 1 and extending through March 25.
The exhibit will include works by Miss Yee Ching-chih, Jack Chen, Chu H. Jor, Kailuen Eng, Moowee Tiam, Tschai Lenzene, Howard Low, and others. Guest exhibitors will include Neysa McNein [sic], Oronzio Maladrelli, Guy Maccoy, Dimitri Romanovesky, and others.
Beginning April 1 and extending through April 15 the Chinese Art club will hold its second photographic salon. Prints for showing may be submitted by any Chinese in any part of the country, and may be of any size, but must be mounted. Submission of prints must be made on or before March 25, announced W. Yukon, in charge of this exhibit. All pictures submitted will be returned in their original wrappings to the senders after the close of the exhibition.
Chinese Club ShowThe New York Times, December 9, 1938, said
The third annual exhibition by members and friends of the Chinese Art Club is now current at 175 Canal Street.
Some participants, such as K. L. Eng, Jack Chen and Mowee Tiam, have turned in work bearing on the dedication of the show to the defense of the Chinese people. Others have followed their older tendencies, Chu H. Jor showing richly painted still lifes of livid lobsters and fruit. Chu W. Young an impressionist landscape, Tschai Lenzene genre landscapes and Yee Ching-Chih landscapes in the Chinese brush technique.
Work by American artists includes Oronzio Maldarelli’s handsome dancer, Guy Maccoy’s “The Old Tree,” two compositions by Genoi Pettit, a still life by Arthur Schwieder and a drawing by Neysa McMein.
The Chinese Art Club has elected Chu Jor as its president succeeding Moowee Tiam, at its fourth annual meeting, recently held. The club will continue this season to introduce to the Chinese and American public the work of Chinese and American artists. The annual children’s exhibition, which will include the work of Chinese children from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and other cities, will be held in the club gallery in February.Chinese Digest, January 1939, said
New Officers for N.Y. Chinese Art ClubTiam was mentioned in Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History (2013). Tiam was listed in the 1948 book, Supplement to Mallett’s Index of Artists, International—Biographical Including Painters, Sculptors, Illustrators, Engravers and Etchers of the Past and the Present.
New York—The Chinese Art Club here at its fourth annual meeting elected Chu Jor for its next president, succeeding Moowee Tiam. Others elected included K.L. Eng, Wesley S. Chan, Marquis Chunn, Arthur Lee, and Stanley H. Chin.
The club is now preparing for its next annual Children’s Art exhibition. This year it intends to have a nation-wide representation and Chinese children’s art work from the Chinese communities of San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and other Chinatowns.
What became of Tiam is not known.
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(Next post on Wednesday: Searching for C.W. Young, Artist and Member of the Chinese Art Club)
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