This exhibition is in partnership with the Shanghai Celebration. It is a year long festival hosted by over 30 San Francisco Bay Area institutions. The cornerstone event is the Asian Art Museum's Shanghai Exhibition.

Please visit: www.shanghaicelebration.com.

GOLD STANDARD: NINE ASIAN/ AMERICAN MODERNIST ARTISTS
Artists: Ruth Asawa, Constance Chang, George Miyasaki, Arthur Okamura, Leo Vallador, Carlos Villa, C.C. Wang, John Way, and Gary Woo
Exhibition: June 10 - July 10, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 12 5pm - 7pm

Panel Discussion: Saturday, June 26, 3-4 pm
Striking Gold: Revisiting California's Asian-American Pioneer Artists
Moderator: De Witt Cheng; Panelists: Mark Johnson, Paul Karlstrom and George Miyasaki

To reserve a space:email art@togonongallery.com

Guest curator: DeWitt Cheng

TOUR THE SHOW

	Ruth Asawa (1926- ) is a Japanese-American sculptor who combines the disciplined approach to form that she learned from modernist Josef Albers with the traditional weaving techniques, creating open, lyrical, floating wire sculptures that suggest bubbles, bulbs and the circulatory systems of plants and animals. Her playful public sculptures grace many San Francisco locations, and her contributions to art education and arts activism have been profound. Asawa had solo shows at the de Young Museum, Pasadena Art Museum, and Fresno Art Center. Her sculptures are installed in various cities in the U.S. including San Francisco, CA, Detroit, MI, Mission Viejo, CA and Phoenix, AZ. Asawa is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum, the Oakland Museum of California and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
	Constance Chang (Chang Shangpu) (1918- ), according to former Asian Art Museum Director, Emily Sano, Chang is “one of the few women artists of her generation to have gained a significant reputation as a painter. Her art and life provide a valuable narrative for modern Chinese paintings as it developed outside the mainland in the second half of the 20th century.” Born into a scholar-gentry family in Nanjing, she chose to pursue a very successful film acting career in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s. Moving to Hong Kong in 1948, she changed course, taking up art. After studying classical painting with the traditionalist Huang Pan-jo and the modernist Lu Shou-k’un, she developed a personal style—combining bold, calligraphic strokes (sometimes made with unorthodox painting implements) in ink with small touches of color—that permitted improvisation within the Chinese tradition. She moved to San Francisco in 1974. In Asia, Chang had solo exhibitions at the Shanghai Museum, Beijing National Gallery, National Gallery, Taipei Hongkong Museum of Art and Tokyu Gallery. In Europe, she has exhibited in London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt. In the U.S., she had solo exhibitions at the University Art Museum at Berkeley and at the Asian Art Museum. Chang lives in San Francisco.
	George Miyasaki (1935- ), was born in Hawaii, attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, studying with Bay Area Figurative painters Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. Oliveiria taught him lithography and both helped Willem de Kooning make lithographs, his first prints, in 1960. Miyasaki’s early Abstract Expressionist style gave way gradually to a more structured approach in which hard-edged, geometric painted shapes are contrasted with collaged paper elements with irregular, torn edges. Miyasaki won while still a student, a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship and a William Gerstle Purchase Prize from the San Francisco Museum of Art. Later he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling him to study and work in Paris. Miyasaki taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts and Stanford before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Miyasaki has exhibited at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the Portland Art Museum, with solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Honolulu, New York, and Portland. His work is in the collection of the British Museum, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery, Washington, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Now retired from teaching, Miyasaki continues painting and printmakingin his studio in Berkeley, CA.
	Arthur Okamura (1932-2009) worked as a teenager in a politically-oriented Chicago silkscreen shop, and aspired to become an illustrator, but studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago led him into the fine arts; a fellowship brought him to Paris in 1954, just after Matisse’s death, and the national mourning dissuaded him from becoming Norman Rockwell II and choosing Yale School of Art and the University of Chicago instead. Through friends (the poet Robert Creeley and the painter John Altoon), Okamura became familiar with the improvisatory disciplines of jazz and Abstract Expressionism. Okamura’s paintings are subjective responses to nature and still life—poetic, humorous, lyrical and mystical; his illustrations for poetry are thus extensions of his painting practice. Okamura taught for many years at the California College of Arts and Crafts, commuting from his longtime home in Bolinas. He had solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the California Palace of the Legion Of Honor, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. His work is in the collection of the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
	Leo Valledor (1936-1989) grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore District and attended the California School of Fine Arts during the 1950s heyday of jazz, Beat and Abstract Expressionism. Valledor was an early member of the Six Gallery, a venue that showcased avant-garde art and poetry, including Allen Ginsberg’s historic poem “Howl,” which premiered there. Valledor’s early black-and-white paintings, made while he was still in college, and featuring torn papers and scraps of writing, were exhibited in Beat-affiliated galleries, but the influence of Zen Buddhism and his move to New York in the 1960s during the minimalist era led him to create radiantly colored geometric abstractions. As a founding member of the Park Place group, he emerged as one of the pioneers of Minimalism exhibiting with Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Robert Grosvenor, Peter Forakis and Mark di Suvero. In 1968 Valledor returned to San Francisco, where he taught at SFAI, UC Berkeley and continued exploring both simplified compositions and complicated multi-panel structures. He exhibited his East/West series in solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Art Institute. Other solo exhibitions were at the de Young Museum and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Valledor received two NEA grants. His work is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Seattle Art Museum, the Yale Art Museum, the Philadelphia Fine Arts Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Crocker Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.
	Carlos Villa (1936- ) was born to Filipino immigrants and grew up in the Tenderloin. At the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute, where he now teaches), he studied with Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell (alongside fellow students Joan Brown, Bruce Conner and William Wiley); later at Mills, he studied with Ralph Ducasse. Returning to San Francisco after a stint in New York, Villa, now influenced by Oceanic art, began adding archaizing, anthropologically suggestive collage elements to his canvases—teeth, bones, shells, hair and blood—and participating in shamanic or ritualistic performance pieces. His search for identity led to the feathered cloaks, masks and shoes for which he is best known, and to social projects centered around Filipino art and culture. Villa has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Oakland Museum of California and the Whitney Museum of Art. His work is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Villa lives and works in San Francisco.
	C.C. Wang (Wang Chi-chien/Wang Jiqian) (1907-2003), was born in Suzhou, China, studied law in Shanghai. Pursuing a lifelong lnterest in art, he became such an avid and discerning collector of the literati (scholar-recluse) art of the Song and Yuan Dynasties—some sixty of his acquisitions are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)—that he was consulted by the government on its imperial collection when he was a young man not yet yet into his thirties. In 1949 he fled the Communist takeover and immigrated to New York City, where he became a consultant to Sotheby’s Auction House and a skilled practitioner of the painting tradition himself. His style was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, and he exploited staining and blotting accidents in order to suggest natural forms that could be clarified and elucidated by his calligraphy-trained brush. Wang had solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Taipei Art Museum and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. His work is in the collection of the Asian Art Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Art Museum.
	John Way (Wei Letang) (1921- ) was born in Shanghai, where he studied art by faithfully transcribing and copying texts from ancient steles and scrolls. His complete assimilation and understanding of the calligraphic tradition, from utilitarian, conservative kai shu (regular script) to the more expressive and perhaps less legible cao shu (grass script) enabled him to combine modes with single works, achieving startling but esthetically gratifying contrasts that play with style, meaning, and, for scholar-hermits, the history of culture. In 1953, Way moved to the United States and lived in Boston. Way attended MIT and studied architecture. In 1973 he moved to Los Altos, California. Way has shown his work around the US and internationally. In 2001 he had a solo show in Shanghai. He lives in San Francisco.
	Gary Woo (1925-2006) was born in Guangzhou and immigrated to San Francisco as a teenager. He was detained for eight months at the Angel Island Immigration Center. He studied with David Park at the California School of Fine Arts and Lundy Siegriest at the Art League, maintained a studio in North Beach at Grant and Green, and sold his poetic abstractions, landscapes, and figures, their jade-and-oxblood color palettes derived from Song Dynasty ceramics, to local luminaries like San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and art critic Alfred Frankenstein. Successful shows in local galleries and museums and broad-based acclaim solidified his position as one of the leading lights of Pacific Rim abstraction: “Chinese writing is the abstract painting of the Chinese,” wrote one reviewer. Woo won the John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship in 1956. He exhibited at the Mi Chou Gallery in New York and the John Bolles Gallery in San Francisco. He also had an important solo exhibition at the de Young in 1960 (the same year as Ruth Asawa’s exhibition there). During the 60s he was one of the region’s preeminent Asian American abstract painters. When the lease in his North Beach studio expired in 1972, Woo and his wife, Yolanda Garfias, traveled extensively and he stopped showing at galleries around the same time. This is the first commercial gallery exhibit of Woo’s work since his death four years ago. Woo’s work is in the collection of the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco.