Event

Karen Fang

Who Gets to be an “Artist” in the Seventh Art?

In cinema, authorship and creative originality is traditionally a prestige attributed to above-the-line talent, such as the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, costume and production designer. Guild history and industry convention have entrenched this custom, but this approach ignores the individual training and interests in which many creatives were shaped. Drawing from her new book, Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong, Karen Fang discusses the multi-layered career of a Chinese immigrant artist and Disney Legend. Wong was a lauded fine artist whose art school classmates included both prominent painters and many future Disney and Hollywood luminaries. Throughout his career in the movie studios, Wong maintained an active fine art profile, and this activity further enhanced his status at the studio. In the supremely collaborative medium of filmmaking, recognizing the range and continuity of Wong’s eclectic career provides an important challenge to our received assumptions about creativity, credit, and cultural-professional status. It also argues for a transmedial blurring of disciplinary boundaries, in which film and animation history, art history, and commercial art overlap.

Karen Fang is Professor in the Department of English, and founder and chair of the CLASS initiative in Media and the Moving Image. A scholar of literature as well as film, Karen Fang is interested in literary and visual narrative under conditions of global capitalism. Her books include Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film (Stanford University Press 2017); Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs (University of Virginia Press 2010); and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (Hong Kong University Press 2004). She also is a regular contributor to the nationally distributed public radio series, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, where her contributions always focus on visual culture. A frequent speaker and collaborator with museums and film festivals around the world, Karen Fang will be speaking about her new book, Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong (Rutgers University Press 2025), which is a biography about a Chinese immigrant artist, centenarian, and Disney Legend.