Mastering a Rare Craft--by Trial and Error

TV Guide, which could encapsulate “The Decameron” in two lines (“Not rated. Partial nudity . . .”), recently summarized a movie in these words:

“ ‘The Great Skycopter Rescue’ (1981). Hang gliders vs. bikers in California (where else?).” Where else, indeed? Anything goes, anything can happen in California. For example, would you believe that a man in Westwood has built a 25-foot-high model of Rouen Cathedral in his front garden--using old aerosol cans? Well, if you would believe it, you would be wrong. I made it up. But there is a man in Chinatown who molds exquisite transparent enamel bowls over those aluminum floats that go into toilet tanks. His name is Gim Fong.

A few months ago I wrote about Robert Kuo, who sells Chinese cloisonne enamels on Melrose Avenue. In cloisonne work, thin strips of metal are soldered to a metal surface to form small “cells” into which different-colored enamels are poured.

Gim Fong, who has an Oriental-antiques and decorative-arts shop on Chungking Road in Chinatown, specializes in a much rarer kind of enamel-work: plique a jour. The technique is similar to cloisonne but involves removing the back plate to leave translucent or transparent enamels held together only by wires, giving the effect of miniature stained-glass panels.

Fong has been learning his art the hard way--by trial and error. He is happy if one piece in three comes from the kiln unscathed. Somebody recently suggested that Fong set up a studio to teach his rare art, and he is considering the possibility but says: “How can I set up as a teacher when I, myself, don’t have full control over the medium?”

Old Chinatown, near Alameda and Los Angeles streets, was Fong’s birthplace in 1931. His uncle came to Los Angeles from Canton (Hwangchow), China in the 1880s to sell antiques. Fong’s father came in 1901 to help the brother. One of Gim Fong’s brothers is Danny Ho Fong of Tropi-Cal furniture. His sister is dress designer Lonnie Fong (the Choey of Theo & Choey Co.).

In 1934, the family returned to Canton.

So Gim Fong has early memories of pagoda roofs and brocaded silks; but in 1936, with the Japanese invading China and with Chinese troops training directly in front of the Fongs’ house, family members were advised, as American citizens, to leave the country.

They returned to Los Angeles, where Fong was educated at Castelar School. He was a prodigy in art classes. On a shelf of his Chinatown shop, he keeps a green-glazed elephant that he made when he was 7 years old; it bears the impress of his childish fingers. It shows an absolute mastery of animal form and of molding technique. The teacher for whom he made it gave him the highest mark possible. Fong recalls that another teacher, who kept him after school as a punishment, demanded that he make her a similar elephant. Fong refused and went on refusing in spite of all threats. That story tells us two things about Gim Fong. He is innately, instinctually talented as an artist; and though outwardly the mildest of men, he is determined and tenacious.

Fong studied design at Los Angeles City College. “They liked everything I designed, and I discovered (I didn’t know before) that I had talent--because, as children, we took it for granted. We drew to amuse ourselves. We didn’t have the money to buy expensive toys. What we did every year was buy damaged toys in the after-Christmas sales at the big department stores; we’d take them home and repair them. That’s how we got so adept with our hands. We had a lot of fun taking the things apart and putting them together again, and I’ve gone on doing that all my life--taking things apart and seeing how they work.”

Fong graduated to amateur automobile repairs. (He is still a car enthusiast and regularly tinkers with the innards of his 1948 Cisitalia coupe.) He served in the Army at the tail end of the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 82nd Airborne Division and worked on airplanes. The techniques that he learned as an aircraft mechanic--soldering, welding, heat treating and metal forming--have come in useful in his enamel work.

Upon his discharge from the army, Fong took over his father’s antique business in Chinatown. He married in 1956 and has two daughters. Fong and his wife live in Monterey Park.

In the shop, Fong specializes in selling miniatures, ivories, lacquered furniture (some set with mother-of-pearl), cricket cages, embroideries and antique Chinese clothing, including the robes of emperors, court officials and priests. “These robes and other textiles are museum pieces,” he says. “They were probably brought from China by clipper ship in the early 1900s. I have one bedspread beautifully embroidered with flowers in satin stitch, and in the middle are some initials, perhaps those of a ship’s captain.”

Also, of course, he sells cloisonne enamel. Surprisingly, he prefers Japanese works to Chinese. “Japanese cloisonne is more one-of-a-kind,” he says. “They did not make a thousand of each design, as the Chinese tended to, and the Japanese went through the same stages I am going through. When I first started, my wares were very crude; and so were theirs. But between the early period and the ‘golden’ period, which was around 1910, the quality went down because cloisonne became commercialized. Originally, the Japanese craftsmen were subsidized by their shogun , so they didn’t have to worry about money. Their workshops up in the hills were simple and peaceful, and they were able to concentrate. They put their whole soul into a piece--and it shows.”

Fong became involved in community work in Chinatown with the Chamber of Commerce. “I developed an ulcer. I won’t go into personalities, but I took a lot of beating. I was a volunteer, but I sure took a lot of abuse.” After an operation for the ulcer, Fong developed hepatitis from a blood transfusion.

While he was convalescing, a woman named Dorothy Kirk asked him to come and view some Chinese works of art that she wanted to sell. Fong went to see whether there was anything he would like to buy. One wall at the back of Kirk’s house was hung with cloisonne wares. They were all plaques, depicting Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters--”very Americanized.”

“Ooh, it looks like cloisonne,” Fong said.

“Yes, I make it,” Kirk replied.

“Gee, I’d sure like to know how to make it.” Fong said

“I’ll teach you,” Kirk said.

And so she did. But after a few lessons, she introduced him to Mary Sharp, who has a studio near Los Angeles International Airport.

“I learned the basics from Mary Sharp,” Fong says, “but I wasn’t telling her what I was doing at home.”

At home, Fong was experimenting with the plique a jour enamel technique. He had seen a Japanese plique a jour bowl in a shop not far from his own. It captivated him, but it was priced at $600 and he could not afford it. Fong bought a book on enamels that contained a chapter on plique a jour . “But it did not tell you what temperatures you needed.” Fong is learning slowly, in the same way the Japanese plique a jour enamelers learned. Plique a jour originated in France in the Middle Ages. The Japanese were impressed by the technique when they saw examples at an international exhibition in Paris in the late 19th Century. They bought a bowl at the exhibition, took it home and analyzed it. Fong is doing much the same. Though he cannot afford to collect plique a jour wares, he does occasionally buy a piece to sell in his shop. He examines it closely and makes tests on it. He keeps records (somewhat haphazard ones, he admits) of his experiments, recording how colors change in the kiln and what temperature produces what effect. “When you mix brown and black, you don’t get a dark brown; you get brown with black specks. Enamels never blend. I also use goldstone, which is like a piece of hard glass. I pound it up until it is pulverized and mix it with the enamels to produce gold flecks.”

Fong’s first work of plique a jour was executed on a flat piece of mica, using silver wire. But he brought it out of the furnace when it was red hot, and the shock of bringing it out into the air cracked it. His designs at that time “were like graffiti. I simply bent some wires, and they came out as this pattern or that. It would have been stupid to put too much time and trouble into the designs, as I was losing so many pieces. I first wanted to get the technique right.” His finest pieces are two bowls that were molded on top of the fluted aluminum float from a toilet. “The fluting gives extra strength,” Fong says. “If I had to order a mold in this shape, it would cost a lot. The toilet float happens to be exactly the right size, and with the right grooves.”

Fong has also experimented with other enamel techniques. He wrote his name in Chinese characters in champleve enamel (the design to receive the enamel is gouged out of the metal). He tried out the “capillary” method--the metal is pierced with small holes to which the molten enamel clings, like dewdrops in the interstices of a spider’s web. He has even done cloisonne work on porcelain, resulting in several minor disasters when the porcelain cracked. He has also made things that have nothing to do with enamel. The most ingenious and covetable of these is a miniature model of his shop’s interior. It even contains a minuscule fan that whirs into action when you press a button on the side of the model. Standing in Fong’s shop and looking at the model is one of those exercises in infinity that philosophers like to debate--rather like looking at a book cover that shows a child reading the book, that shows a child reading the book, that shows a child reading the book . . . until the child is an undecodeable dot.

Gim Fong has just been to Tokyo, looking for unusual copper bases for his enamel work. He found some (one cost $100) and also bought a pair of the elegant spring clippers used by the Japanese craftsmen to cut their wire, and some stones for polishing--in nine different grades. “It’s the polishing that takes the longest time and can become tedious,” he says. But even such semi-drudgery is something that he would never entrust to an assistant. Every piece that he makes is Fong-conceived, Fong-designed and Fong-made from beginning to end. The largest dish that he is working on will take him a year to finish, he estimates. He is copying an antique picture onto it.

“This one is going to be different,” he says. “As well as bending each wire, I am going to sculpt each wire, varying the thickness.” That is a technique he learned from the Japanese. On the last day of his recent Tokyo trip, he met a helpful enamels-factory owner.

“It is a pity that I met him so late,” Fong laments. “He was going to show me his factory, and I was going to talk in more technical terms through an interpreter. At our first and only meeting, I had a difficult job conveying my thoughts to him, since his English was not good--though it was better than my Japanese.” Fong was in the process of getting some special enamels that could not be bought in Los Angeles, “but I hadn’t decided what colors. I need to think it over; it runs into a lot of money.” He intends to return to Japan to pick up whatever he can in know-how and materials, but he is sure that, in the long run, only painstaking experimentation will yield what he wants.

“There are techniques I want to perfect that are lost even in Japan, such as moriage --the cloisonne is finished and then flowers are formed on top of it, standing out in relief, three-dimensionally. I have already tried two ways of doing it, but they didn’t work.”