You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, though if you have ever been moved by the breathtaking forest scenes in Disney’s Bambi, the soft, atmospheric light filtering through the trees, the dreamy impressionistic landscapes that give the film its unforgettable beauty, you have seen his art.
To honour Asian American History Month, film scholar and cultural critic Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong. This biography portrays the artist behind Bambi’s beautiful images: a Chinese immigrant who arrived in America as a child, endured a month of detention at Angel Island, grew up in a Chinatown ghetto and went on to shape the childhoods of millions across the world. During his 106-year life, Tyrus’s achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making were legendary.
Tyrus Wong Brushstrokes in Hollywood
In Background Artist, Karen Fang reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered little opportunity to Chinese Americans.
The title, Background Artist, is a reference to Tyrus Wong’s official Disney credit in the 1942 release of the movie Bambi. Karen embraces it as a deliberate metaphor. ‘All immigrants are background artists’, she writes in the book’s closing passages. ‘But immigrant artists like Tyrus Wong are particularly fascinating, both for how their work enriches our world and how they refuse to stay in the background.’ It is a phrase that encapsulates everything Background Artist sets out to do: to restore visibility to a life that was too long lived in the margins.
One of the Pastel Illustrations That Inspired the Movie: ‘Bambi’
Tyrus Wong
Before working at Disney, Tyrus was already an accomplished fine artist whose prints appeared in a Chicago exhibition alongside Matisse and Picasso. After Bambi, he moved through Hollywood storyboarding and greeting cards. He became one of America’s most beloved card artists in the Golden Age of the form. In retirement, he handcrafted kites he flew on Santa Monica Beach, gathering communities of strangers around him simply through the magnetic pull of his art.
Tyrus Wong
The Walt Disney Family Museum
As Karen Fang discovered through Tyrus’s personal correspondence, he was also wickedly funny, trading gag drawings and naughty notes with his best friends, making jokes about his accent and turning every occasion into a creative act.
One of the Pastel Illustrations That Inspired the Movie: ‘Bambi’
Tyrus Wong
The tension between visibility and invisibility runs through Background Artist, from Chinese Exclusion laws that sought to render Asian immigrants marginal; to the irony of Tyrus Wong’s bureaucratically documented paper identity; to the triumph of a visual style so distinctly his own that it made him indispensable. Karen Fang’s biography is, at its heart, a story about what art can do that politics cannot: turn difference into an asset, and refuse, quietly and gloriously, to stay in the background.
Praise for Background Artist
‘The definitive new biography.’
Smithsonian Magazine
‘Fang reveals how Wong’s career . . . reflected the tension between visibility and invisibility experienced by many of the era’s Asian immigrants, who shaped American culture in ways that were often overlooked or unseen. . .. The result is a worthy tribute to a groundbreaking artist.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Though a creative legend is the heart of Fang’s well-researched and affecting book, it also explores L.A.’s Chinese American culture and the powerful potential of art.’
Booklist
‘It offers a rich, nuanced perspective on Wong’s contributions—not only as an artist, but as a Chinese-American navigating a segregated industry and finding ways to make his mark through innovation and beauty. . . Packed with vivid details, Fang’s narrative unveils a kaleidoscopic exploration of the immigrant origins behind some of America’s most beloved imagery.’
Animation World Network
‘Wong’s extraordinary 106 years on earth is a story of resilience and triumph, told fondly and in meticulous detail by film scholar and cultural critic Karen Fang.’
Mekong Review
‘Karen Fang has created a sweeping and richly detailed portrait of Tyrus Wong that captures both the breadth and beauty of his art and the complexity and often cruel irony of living in a society that simultaneously embraced and tried to erase him. Background Artist is a stunning achievement.’
Pamela Tom, director of award-winning PBS American Masters documentary Tyrus.
‘Karen Fang has written a deeply researched and intimate biography of the great modern Chinese American artist Tyrus Wong, whose elegant, poetic, and dramatic brushstrokes have been enjoyed by millions. This is an inspiring and pertinent portrait of Wong, an immigrant child who lived to be 106 years old and who struggled to overcome racism with his art.’
John Canemaker, Oscar-winning animator and professor emeritus at
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
‘In Background Artist, Tyrus Wong finally receives the biography he deserves. Placing Wong’s life within the broader narrative of Asian American history, Karen Fang illuminates the ways in which events ranging from Chinese Exclusion to Japanese American wartime incarceration to the creation of the Model Minority myth influenced Wong’s work as an artist. Fang’s engaging, highly readable style makes this a must-read for academic and general audiences alike.’
William Gow, author of Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
‘In her compulsively readable, painstakingly researched biography of the multi-hyphenate Tyrus Wong—storyboard and sketch artist at Disney and Warner Bros., painter, illustrator, Hallmark card designer and kite maker, Chinese émigré and American trailblazer—Karen Fang skillfully blends political, cultural, and motion-picture history to tell the gripping story of one of classical Hollywood’s unsung heroes.’
Noah Isenberg, author of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie
‘In this deeply researched and timely biography, Karen Fang rightly positions Tyrus Wong at the center of American visual culture of the mid-20th century. Background Artist brings Wong and the Chinese diaspora to the foreground, reorienting how we think about Hollywood, California history, and American commercial production, generally.’
Jennifer Greenhill, endowed professor of American art, University of Arkansas
KAREN FANG is a film scholar and cultural critic who writes for museums and film festivals around the world. She is a professor of English at the University of Houston, and her previous books include Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film and Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship. She also is a prominent contributor to the radio series, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, where her stories about technology and innovation always focus on visual art.