This volume presents a selection of paintings, poetry, essays, and ephemeral writings by the Chinese American modernist Yun Gee (1906-1963), together with essays about the artist.

Yun Gee arrived in San Francisco from Guangdong Province at the age of fifteen and within a few years established himself as one of the city's most daring avant-garde painters. But all of his astonishing efforts with the brush and palette ran up against an intense anti-Chinese sentiment. He seemed never to escape the high social price of being Chinese--not in San Francisco, Paris, or New York,...

The relationship between writers and artists has long been a collaborative one. Plato used the word ekphrasis to describe what happens when a writer writes creatively, as opposed to critically, about art. Gertrude Stein claimed that her innovative writing style was inspired by the paintings of Cezanne -- and then went on to tell Hemingway to study Cezanne if he wanted to learn to write.

In Looking Together, a dozen writers working in a range of styles and forms respond to works of art held in the permanent collection of Seattle's Frye Art Museum or exhibited there. Romantic...

"Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacan. This diversity of ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the latter." -Ruben...