Searching for C.W. Young, Artist and Member of the Chinese Art Club

C.W. Young was also known as Chu W. Young and may have, at times, dropped his middle initial.

An artist named Chu Young was profiled in the newspaper, Daily Argus (Mount Vernon, New York), August 30, 1938. According to the profile Young was 34 years old and born in Canton, China. His friend and fellow artist, Wu Tan-Ku, age 32, was also profiled. There is the possibility that Wu Tan-Ku was the artist known as Don Gook Wu.

The article was reprinted in the Herald Statesman (Yonkers New York), September 7, 1938. The caption reads:

Chu Young (left) and Wu Tan-Ku are shown as they set to work on their latest paintings of Westchester scenes. Residents of Mount Vernon for the past seven years, the Oriental artists sell their work for a living and send a good part of the proceeds to their countrymen in war-torn China.

 

The earliest mention of Young was in the New York Post, October 24, 1936.

Chinese Art Club Holds Canal Street Exhibit

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.

The Daily Worker (New York, New York), September 18, 1937, said

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.

The New York Post, September 18, 1937, said

Chinese Artists Join Japanese in WPA Job Protest
Forget War in Fighting Project Exclusion—“Fail to Support” China Invasion

While their fellow-countrymen were fighting it out to the death 10,000 miles away, many of New York’s Chinese and Japanese artists collaborated this week in a joint art exhibition at the A. C. A. Gallery under sponsorship of the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress.

Though the artists manifested their solidarity in the face of the Sino-Japanese conflict, the primary motivation for their show arose not from the situation in the Far East but that in the United States. I refer to the exclusion of noncitizens from WPA jobs.

Because of their ineligibility for American citizenship, the discrimination against Orientals was 100 per cent. Let Chuzo Tamotzu, delegate of the Japanese-Chinese group on the recent job march to Washington, sum up the situation:

“Most of us have been here at least fifteen to twenty-five years, living and working as American artists, and accepted as such. For example, Kuniyoshi has been invited to the Carnegie International not as a Japanese but as an American.

Still Subject to the Draft

“We expect to continue to live here. In the event of war, we should be subject to the draft, just as we were in the last war. Why, then, should we be discriminated against in social benefits?

“I might add that we want to live here peacefully and as advocates of peace and culture, in harmony with the peace policy of the present United States Administration. Thus we have nothing to do with support of the Japanese Army now unjustly invading China.”

This is a case that does not have to be supported on principles alone. The exhibit presents achievements which were largely made possible, except in the case of Kuniyoshi, by WPA. They are now deprived of its support.

Exhibit Excellent Work

There is the powerful thrust of Ishigaki’s aroused peasants and workers, the forceful symbolist work of Suzuki, the sensitive naturalism of Tamotzu and the light fancy of Nagai. Sober strength marks Tagawa’s “Chinese Toilers.” Excellent textural quality is found in a still life by a quite new exhibitor, Kiyoshi Shimizu.

G. [sic] W. Young’s impressionist landscapes and Don Gook Wu’s more subjectively accented canvases are the most interesting work by Chinese-born painters.

Here, then, is a challenge to liberals. A group of artists active in the midst of American cultural life has been legally put beyond the pale. Can progressives afford to rest until this reactionary step which narrows the base of American culture has been rescinded?

Art Front, October 1937, said

Chinese and Japanese Artists
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.

The New York Post, March 19, 1938, said

Chinese Club Show
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.

An endnote mentioned Young in Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008).

Young has not been found in the 1930, 1940 and 1950 United States censuses. A search for his World War II draft card or enlistment record yielded no results.
 

Young was listed as a life member of the Art Students League in the 1951 publication, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Presents the 75th Anniversary Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture by 75 Artists Associated with the Art Students League of New York.

The following are possible matches for the artist. The Schenectady Gazette (New York), August 15, 1944, published the Schenectady Savings Bank notice for unclaimed property. The list included someone named Chu Young who lived at 409 Franklin Street in Schenectady. On March 17, 1956 a passenger named Young Chu was aboard a Pan American World Airways flight bound for London, England. Someone named Young Chu became a naturalized citizen on June 17, 1968 in New York City. He was born on November 16, 1901.

What became of the artist is not known.

 

Related Posts
Artist Chu H. Jor and the Chinese Art Club 

Chu Jor in the American Artists Congress 2nd Annual Exhibition
Chu H. Jor, Moo-Wee Tiam, Don Gook Wu and C. W. Young at ACA Gallery, September 1937
Searching for Moowee Tiam, Artist and Member of the Chinese Art Club
Sui Wesley Chan, Artist and Member of the Chinese Art Club
Howard Low, Artist and Illustrator

 

 

(Next post on Wednesday: A Few Details About K. L. Eng, Artist and Member of the Chinese Art Club)