Article on Artist Lenore Chinn

Check out art exhibit by Lenore Chinn! 

June 8 – 30, 2012

1007 Market St.

San Fran, CA 94103

Cultural Confluence

By Rachel Howard

Source: SF Chronicle

In the center of Mid-Market's noisy, funky Luggage Store Gallery, a wiry Asian American woman wearing a silk vest, tie, ball cap and glasses sits on a bench calling out, "Bye, Carl, bye, sweetheart, good to meet your friend. Oh, bye, honey. Oh, another artist. We're all artists here. We're all friends, I swear." At 63, with a waist-long ponytail and big-toothed smile that make her appear closer to 20, Lenore Chinn is amiably comfortable at this reception and in her own skin. Perhaps the only thing she's not comfortable with is simplistic categories.

"So many people try to pigeonhole you," she says. "But you can't say I'm going to be gay this day and Asian American another. You don't split it up."

That's why Chinn's show, on view through June 30, is titled "Cultural Confluences," though what's on display speaks equally to contrast. The centerpiece is "The Oracle Room," a new 30-by-40-inch acrylic painting, funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, of two visitors grinning at some off-canvas spectacle in the basement of the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville (Yuba County). The wall opposite holds a 4-foot-wide portrait of Bernice Bing, the deceased Chinese lesbian painter and mentor to Chinn. Next to that, on a smaller canvas, hangs an up-the-skirt view of a drag performer at nightclub Asia SF.

The unifying factors are Chinn's photo-realist style and her instantly evident warmth toward her subjects. "I shoot hundreds of pictures to work from, but then I put them on the computer screen and tweak in Photoshop, and I reinsert details from the face," says Chinn, whose uncle Benjamen Chinn studied under Ansel Adams. "My uncle talked about the joy of seeing a photo come to life as it developed. For me, painting is like that."

Chinn was aware of pioneering photo-realist Robert Bechtle, though she never studied under him - he arrived to teach at then-San Francisco State College a few years after she graduated in 1972, with a degree in sociology. And unlike Bechtle's work, Chinn's use of photo-realism imparts not so much a sense of nostalgia as it does a feeling of easy intimacy, especially in early paintings of her dancer friend Robaire Armand.

Self-taught

Chinn is largely self-taught. Her most important influences came from her family. Her mathematician father, who had grown up in San Francisco's Chinatown, moved the Chinns to the Richmond District in the 1950s, when few Asian Americans or people of color lived there. He had developed a love of Western art while serving a tour in Europe for the Army. He took his daughter to the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor regularly on weekends, while also collecting ancient Chinese jades and bronzes. Lenore quickly developed a hand for sketching.

She attended George Washington High School on 33rd and Geary, and studied commercial art for a year at San Francisco City College. But at S.F. State in 1971, a friend took her along to a sociology class, and that angle on the world seemed relevant during tumultuous times. Daily protests of the Vietnam War made police a constant campus presence, and Chinn documented them with her camera.

She soon found herself in the middle of a different cultural crisis after she graduated and moved into the Castro flat on Duboce that still serves as her studio and living space. Friends - including a group of gay Latino friends Chinn used to accompany on trips to the Hollywood Hills - began dying of AIDS.

Chinn herself "had inklings" of her sexual orientation in high school, but didn't fully understand her identity and come out until the '80s. "My mother had a hard time with it," she remembers. "My father was different - he had a gay brother who killed himself. So he was always sensitive."

Chinn became a busy activist, organizing for AIDS awareness organizations and helping form groups like the Asian American Women Artists Association, all while supporting herself as a part-time lab technician at Davies Medical Center (she's now retired after 35 years) and painting daily.

But community life went on, and friends began commissioning Chinn to paint their portraits as couples. This led to Chinn's "Domestic Partners" series of nine canvases, in which she continued to develop her technique of applying a very dry brush, and using layers of washes beneath to create saturation and depth. Perhaps her most accomplished painting is a 3-foot-tall portrait of partnered friends Kim Anno and Ellen Meyers, "Before the Wedding," staged with Anno's abstract paintings in the background.


In recent years, Chinn has discovered the Bok Kai Temple, a designated state historical site in Marysville, a structure "so Chinese, you can't tell you're in California," she says. One of the biggest paintings in the current show is of a harvest festival spread of fruits and fish, rendered in rich reds and oranges - with a blue-labeled plastic bottle of Kirkland's brand water right in the center.

Chinese roots

"She acknowledges her Chinese roots, but the work is a little quirky," says Nancy Hom, who curated "Just Chinese Enough," a show juxtaposing Chinn's paintings with the photographs of Bob Hsiang, at SOMArts in 2009.


Longtime friend Darrell Leong agrees. Staring at her newest painting, and especially at the obsessive detail with which Chinn captured the wrinkles on his face as he smiled at a lantern in the temple's basement, Leong grinned.


"I was surprised she chose that shot. I begged and pleaded for her to make me look thin and smooth. But she wanted the reality of it all."


Cultural Confluences: Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Through June 30. The Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market St., S.F. (415) 255-5971. www.luggagestoregallery.org.

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com