Artist

Wong, Paul (Huang, Bau-Xi)

Title

Deep Cove Islands

Technique

ink

Date

1965

Dimensions

54.5 height x 23.0 width

Type

print

Accession Number

2020.16.10

Collection

Permanent Collection

Gift of Alan and Elizabeth Bell

Born in 1933 in Guangdong province, Huang was the oldest of three sons. At age 16, he had to grow up fast when his father was imprisoned following the 1949 Communist revolution. In 1956, he was 23 when he arrived in Vancouver. In addition to his day job, Huang took classes at the Vancouver School of Art (Now Emily Carr University of Art and Design). His painting teacher was Ron Stonier, a Vancouver modernist painter. Stonier suggested to Huang that he open an art gallery.Huang already had already established a reputation in the city’s art community as a promising abstract painter.In 1963, his painting was one of five singled out in an exhibition in the Seattle Art Museum by Clement Greenberg, the leading art critic in the U.S. Huang also won a prize at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Bau-Xi Gallery also showed Huang’s paintings under the name Paul C. Wong. The middle initial helped differentiate him from the Vancouver multimedia artist Paul Wong. Bau-Xi means “great gift or fortune” in Mandarin. It’s Huang’s own transliteration of his first name Boo-Si.