Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Win Ng established his reputation as a master ceramist, with an initial focus on abstract, non-utilitarian works in the tradition of Peter Voulkos. Raised in Chinatown, he attended Saint Mary’s Academy for six years where he studied Chinese language. Later, he attended City College of San Francisco, and San Francisco State. After discharge from the army, he resumed his studies in ceramics at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute), and received his BFA in 1959. In1960, he attended Mills College, but never completed his MFA.

In 1958 he had his first one man show at the Michow Gallery in New York, then, in 1961, was represented by Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco (now the Braunstein/Quay Gallery) who continues to represent his work posthumously. Many traditional critics feel that Ng’s important work dates from 1958 to 1965, the years before he shifted his creative output from gallery art to more functional work.

This “functional” work was a collaborative entrepreneurial endeavor with artist Spaulding Taylor. As co-founder of Environmental Ceramics (later to be named Taylor & Ng), Win Ng established himself as a consummate decorative designer and innovative entrepreneur. Taylor & Ng shifted the paradigm in retail merchandising by raising the awareness and perception of the mass market toward finely wrought hand-crafted artware, and in the process became the model for many culinary and speciality stores to follow. The Chinese Wok was just one of many objects Taylor & Ng help to popularize.

Following a twenty-year journey (from 1965 to 1985) Taylor & Ng grew from a small ceramics shop on Howard Street, to a mega, multi-level emporium at Embarcadero Center. There were also stores at the Stanford Shopping Center and other Bay Area locations as well a Taylor & Ng shop inside Macy’s in New York.

But Ng continued with his fine art even during this two-decade decorative period. He produced a veritable torrent of work—thrown ceramic bowls, pots, bottles, vases, dishes, slab constructions, sculptures in earthenware and metal, paintings, drawings, book illustrations, as well as hundreds of decorative designs for Taylor & Ng—in scales ranging from minute to monumental. And while this public departure from the purely fine art realm may have cost him an ongoing reputation in the gallery/museum world, it was his renewed focus on fine art in the final years of his life, as well as his innovations in decorative and ceramic arts that underscore his important contribution as a post-modern artist. In the last decade of his life (1981-1991) Win Ng would leave the retail world and re-visit in earnest his deep passion, “bringing together in one integrated work” his artful life.

- Allen R. Hicks

Untitled
Earthware sculpture, 1983

Gary Woo was an acclaimed abstract painter who worked in San Francisco for five decades.

Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1925, Woo relocated to San Francisco in 1939. After serving in World War II, Woo studied briefly at the San Francisco Art League and the California School of Fine Arts. His abstract painting was related to the Chinese calligraphy he had learned from his father, and Woo’s interest in the glazed surfaces of Chinese ceramics. Woo’s work was recognized with awards, positive reviews and prestigious exhibition invitations during the 1950s and 1960s, and the North Beach studio which he shared with his wife, acclaimed art educator Yolanda Garfias, became an inspiring destination.

After their studio lease expired in 1972, the couple moved to a small house on the southern edge of San Francisco near Daly City. Although he continued to paint until his death in 2006, Woo exhibited less frequently in his later years.

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Gary Woo CV

Ms. Bing was instrumental in establishing the South of Market Cultural Center (SomArts) as a nonprofit organization. She pioneered the SomArts Gallery Space, worked with the neighborhood Arts and CETA programs for fifteen years, serving as a panelist on the National Endowment for the Arts Expansion Program in 1968 and 1969.

The fall and winter of 1984-85, Ms. Bing visited Korea and Japan and traveled extensively in China, where she presented slide lectures of American Abstract Expressionism to art students. She spent six weeks studying Chinese calligraphy with Wang Dong Ling and Chinese landscape painting with Professor Yang at the Zhejiang Art Academy in Haungzhou, an experience which has inspired the unification of Eastern and Western ideologies in her abstract paintings.

After serving over two decades to the development of community arts programs, Ms. Bing returned to concentrate on her art. In 1991, Ms. Bing was invited to do a one-person exhibition at SomArts Gallery (3,000 sq. ft.) in which she presented new work. Since then, 1995-1997, she was invited to major exhibitions across the United States. In 1996, Ms. Bing was selected by the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts Visual Arts Honor Award, in conjunction with a group exhibition at the Rose Museum, Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

In 1997-98, Ms. Bing was invited to participate in a major traveling exhibition, “Asian Tradition/Modern Expression, 1945-1970,” organized by The Jane Vorhee Zimmerli Art Museum in cooperation with the Rutgers University of New Jersey. After traveling to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the exhibition was shown in Taiwan in the spring of 1998.

In 1998, Bing’s work was part of a traveling exhibition of abstract painters who are primarily influenced by Asian cultures, entitled “Women On the Silk Road.” The show premiered in San Francisco and then traveled to venues along the silk road trade route in Asia and Europe, including Dhanghi, Hang Chow and Bei-jing, China.

Mayacamas No. 6 Oil on canvas, 49" x 48", 1963 Permanent collection, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

Abstract Calligraphy Mixed media, 35" x 24", 1987 Collection of Bernice Bing Estate

Portrait of Bernice Bing, Collection of Bernice Bing Estate

Portrait of Bernice Bing, Collection of Bernice Bing Estate

View a conversation with Lenore Chinn on Bernice Bing
Download CV [pdf]