Dong Kingman was a Chinese American artist and one of America's leading watercolor masters.
11 Facts About Dong Kingman
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Dong Kingman has won widespread critical acclaim and his works are included in over 50 public and private collections worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum; deYoung Museum and Art Institute, Chicago.
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Dong Kingman was born Dong Moy Shu in Oakland, California, the son of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong.
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Dong Kingman began his formal education at the Bok Jai School, where he was given a school name in accordance with Chinese customs.
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Dong Kingman studied under Szeto Wai, the Paris-trained head of the Lingnan Academy.
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Dong Kingman returned to the United States in his late teens.
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Dong Kingman settled in Brooklyn, New York after the war, where he held a position as an art instructor at Columbia University and Hunter College from 1946 for the next ten years.
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Dong Kingman died in 1954 and he married the writer Helena Kuo in 1956.
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Dong Kingman was faculty at the Famous Artists School and his students included artists Win Pe and Paw Oo Thet, among others.
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In 1981, Dong Kingman made history as the first American artist to be featured in a solo exhibition following the resumption of diplomatic relations between the US and China when the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China hosted a critically acclaimed exhibition that drew over 100,000 people.
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Dong Kingman died of pancreatic cancer in his home in New York City in 2000, at age 89.