Turning West, He Hit Gold

Forty years ago, Mian Situ was a poor boy in China, endlessly sketching while the chickens scratched in a corner. He didn’t spend a lot of time researching subjects. He just drew Mao, and then he drew Mao some more.

“Every day, Mao,” Situ said. “I thought he had the most wonderful face in the world.”

It’s different now. To begin with, the artist lives in a gated neighborhood in San Dimas. A big-screen Sony TV sits in the corner of his living room. And if you had stopped by his place this spring to see what was on his easel, you’d have found not Mao and not China, but a Rockwellian scene of a Chinese entrepreneur posing in a San Francisco photo studio, circa 1890. Thanks to hard work, good luck, Joseph Stalin and his old subject Mao, Mian Situ has made himself into one of America’s most successful painters of the Old West.

For six years now, Situ has painted historical scenes of the Chinese immigrants who came to California more than a century ago -- the people California Gov. Leland Stanford in 1862 labeled “the dregs” of Asia’s “numberless millions.” In Situ’s portrayals, these newcomers lay railroad tracks, peddle toys in San Francisco’s old Chinatown, labor in laundries and gaze ashore from eastbound ships, approaching California for the first time.

This may seem a narrow niche for an artist, but in the world of Western art -- where collectors embrace history, accuracy and draftsmanship even as high-minded critics scoff that kitsch and nostalgia dominate the entire genre -- it has become a valuable one. By March, when he began work on that San Francisco scene, Situ’s works were selling for as much as $125,000 each.

“He gets the figures, he gets the perspective, he gets gesture,” said Amy Scott, curator of visual art at the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West. “And it stands out doubly because of the subject matter.”

“He tells a story very, very well,” said Howard Terpning, a 78-year-old Tucson painter who is widely hailed as the dean of living Western artists. “But in Mian’s case it has to be more difficult, because he’s depicting really another world.”

Situ, a slight 53-year-old with an easy smile and a scar near his collar from heart bypass surgery in February, mostly lets his work do the talking.

“To do something, I have to understand it,” he said. “The Chinese in America -- I think I’m the right one to do this, because I have both experiences.”

Joan Griffith, director of the Trailside Gallery in Scottsdale, Ariz., which has represented Situ since 2000, said he was one of an onslaught of immigrant Chinese realist painters. Once they “were able to pursue other cultures and get away from just painting Mao Tse-tung, all hell broke loose,” Griffith said.

At the California Art Club, a Pasadena-based group that has championed traditional painting and California history since 1909, Chinese membership has exploded since 1996, and President Peter Adams guesses that at least 60 of the club’s 300 artist members are Chinese.

“In some ways, I guess it starts with Joseph Stalin,” Adams said. And the artists agree.

It was Stalin who seized upon Socialist Realism as a propaganda tool in the early 20th century. Just about the time that many top American artists were turning toward modernism and theory, he ordered the Soviet Union’s top art academies to emphasize technical skill and the powerful portrayal of figures and landscapes. When Mao’s revolution prevailed in 1949, the Chinese leader brought Stalin’s thinking east.

Instead of drawing from Chinese tradition, which before the 20th century didn’t include oil painting, Mao set out to establish a Soviet-style training system in China. Through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution and the confusion following Mao’s death in 1976, elements of that system survived. So when China opened in the 1980s, eager legions of old-school artists were among those who came streaming out.

Huihan Liu, one of Situ’s fellow students in Guangzhou 35 years ago, today paints in the Bay Area, alternating between Native American dancers and Tibetan landscapes, and occasionally leads workshops in New Mexico that feature models in leather chaps and cowboy hats. Another Guangzhou classmate, Z.S. “Joe” Liang, came to the U.S. in 1982, made a name doing murals and portraits, then fell in love with Native American history. Last year, eager to be closer to Western scenery and collectors, Liang left New England for Agoura Hills.

Though their sale prices don’t match Situ’s, both painters regularly make five-figure sales, leaving homegrown dealers and collectors of Western art with a fine irony to mull: If Mao hadn’t been trying so hard to rewrite history with Eastern socialism, these Chinese artists might never have spun Western history into gold.

And for Situ, there’s an added layer: If he had been born 120 years sooner, he might be in one of these pictures instead of painting them. Most of the job-hungry Chinese railroad workers and mining-town laborers who helped build the American West came from southern China’s Siyi region, where Situ was raised.

For most of his youth, Situ’s family lived in the town of Chi Kan, about 120 miles southwest of Guangzhou. At night, Situ shared a bed with his grandfather and his older brother, while his parents and his younger sister shared another bed in the next room.

The chickens, and sometimes rabbits and geese, slept in a corner of the living room. There was no electricity, the nearest toilet was a block away, and when you wanted to shower or do laundry, you walked to the river.

“People might think I had misfortune because I had a poor childhood, but I take it as lucky,” Situ said. “I’ve lived just 50 years. Other people might need to live a couple of hundred to live through what I have.”

He was 13 and the Cultural Revolution was just beginning, he recalled, when he saw a friend drawing with a pencil, copied him and liked it. For the next six months, working from propaganda portraits and photos, he sketched Mao.

“Now I look back,” said Situ, a grin forming, “and he’s not handsome at all!”

At 19, Situ enrolled in the Guangzhou Institute of Fine Art, where first-year students were forbidden from using color because it might distract them from draftsmanship. By 29, Situ was himself a veteran teacher at the institute, having studied in graduate school under a Soviet-trained master.

But the cultural landscape was changing. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, had opened the door to outside influences. And modern art, “like a big wave from the ocean,” had come to China, Situ said.

“Everybody was trying to get to Picasso and Matisse,” Situ recalled. “If you didn’t catch up with modern art, you were not good. If you were traditional, you were conservative, and nobody liked you.... Those were confusing years for me. Struggling years.”

In 1987, Situ came to Los Angeles but couldn’t get a foothold. By the following year, he was in Vancouver, British Columbia, doing charcoal portraits of passersby in Stanley Park. At $20 a portrait, he earned enough each summer to spend the winter on oils, often scenes of Chinese rural life.

By 1998, Situ was earning enough that he and his wife, Helen, could move back to Los Angeles with their daughter, Lisa, then 3. Two years later came the phone call that changed his career.

That’s when John Geraghty, a longtime collector in Glendale who has become a force in the Western art world, introduced himself.

Geraghty was organizing the Autry museum’s annual Masters of the West auction, and he had admired Situ’s work with other subject matter. If Situ would try some Western scenes, Geraghty said, he’d be welcome to join the blue-chip artists showing at the 2001 Masters. Situ was flattered, but he had doubts.

“I had no idea that kind of subject could sell,” he recalled. “If I spend two months on that, it has to sell.”

In those days, Geraghty remembered, Situ “was chained to the easel. He had to just whip them out as fast as he could.” But Geraghty talked him into producing three paintings for the Masters, and soon Situ was puzzling over the colors and composition of the most important one, “ ‘John Chinamen’ in the Sierra.”

The work shows a team of Chinese railroad workers, one having a wounded foot tended by a Chinese doctor, with jagged Sierra peaks rising in the background.

Other Western artists have portrayed Chinese workers over the years, but from the day the piece appeared, Amy Scott remembered, “there was buzz. It was a clear standout.” The work sold for $33,000 and is now owned by a Dallas collector.

These days when the artist is ready to paint, he climbs the stairs, sometimes in fluffy pink slippers, to a studio-bedroom strewn with books about the Old West, snapshots from visits to China, back issues of Arizona Highways magazine, even an old collection of nasty caricatures of Chinese immigrants. Sure, the images are racist, but sometimes, Situ said, “I can find something useful.”

He has completed about three dozen canvases with Chinese Western themes, and sells them for steadily rising prices. (The Autry owns one.) Yet he spends just as much time on landscapes and Chinese rural scenes that take less time per picture and bring in less money. He keeps doing them, he says, because he likes the variety.

But the days of charcoal portraits are done. In fact, Helen Situ has become a dealer and opened a gallery in Laguna Beach; and the artist is also able to help his parents, still alive in China, and a grown daughter in Toronto from his first marriage. He completes about 60 paintings per year.

“They have a waiting list for me now,” he confessed.

This list, in fact, includes his wife’s gallery. Because her husband has commitments elsewhere, Helen Situ mostly handles work by other artists.

Situ’s “draftsmanship, his design, his sense of color, his painterly approach -- you don’t reach that level without a lot of study and effort,” said Terpning, whose own works have sold for as much as $1 million. Three years ago, Terpning paid $72,500 for the painting that Situ considers his favorite so far.

That piece, “The Golden Mountain, Arriving in San Francisco, 1865,” is a shipboard scene of Chinese immigrants packed together on an exposed deck, catching their first sight of California. Selling to Terpning, Situ said, was “much honor.”

But, of course, the artist was looking to surpass it, perhaps with “The Entrepreneur.” On a visit in May, Situ’s advisor Geraghty took a long, close look at it while the artist waited with the solicitude of a student whose grade was at stake.

On the easel, an affluent Chinese immigrant stood in a photo studio, posing for a picture to send home as evidence of his success. The immigrant, a man about Situ’s age, held a flower in one hand and fedora in the other, a false background unfurled behind him that looked like the terrace of a European mansion. While the photographer ducked under a hood to frame the shot, the subject’s family whispered and watched. Geraghty took it all in, from historical accuracy to composition to color values.

“If that line doesn’t come all the way down, these values here should be more apparent,” he suggested finally.

Situ took note, made a few touch-ups, then shipped the painting off to be auctioned at the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction in Reno, now titled “The Entrepreneur, San Francisco -- 1890.” It was expected to fetch $60,000 to $90,000.

“John is always the first audience to look at my paintings,” Situ said.

Three months later, on the night of the July 22 auction, Situ and his wife were at home when the phone rang. It was Geraghty, calling from Reno.

“John had a very calm tone when he started the conversation,” Situ said. “He talked about how much fun the auction was and such. I was thinking, here comes the bad news.”

Then Geraghty delivered the word: “The Entrepreneur” had sold for $212,800, nearly twice the record for Situ’s work.

“Helen jumped up and down,” Situ said.

For the next month or so, the artist will be sticking with smaller projects, and he doesn’t like to plan his big oil paintings too far ahead. But for years now, Situ has been bumping up against the year 1906 in his research.

“I’m probably going to do a piece about the earthquake,” he said. “But the subject is difficult. If I do a painting about that, I have to show people hope.”

In fact, though he’s 30 years and 7,000 miles removed from his days in training, it may be that an element of the propagandist remains with him.

“You can’t just emphasize those suffering. Because when you look at the big picture, it’s still optimistic,” Situ said. “I have to give people courage and hope and meaning. Probably some people would say that’s not real art, but I still insist on this.”