In Los Angeles’s New Chinatown, in a lovingly restored blue building that flanks Central Plaza, a watercolor painting by Tyrus Wong, entitled Confucius as a Justice, hangs majestically in a beautiful office away from public view. The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California invited curator Sonia Mak of Art Salon Chinatown to organize an online virtual exhibition about this important artwork that has never been exhibited.

This exquisite piece calls out Confucius (551–479 BCE), a seminal figure from Chinese antiquity, whose philosophy was the progenitor of China’s most enduring humanistic ideals and cultural values. More than just a depiction of the ancient sage, this artwork also signifies a friendship between two twentieth-century pioneers in the Asian American community who called Los Angeles home: famed immigration lawyer You Chung Hong (1898-1977) who fought racist legislation against Chinese and played a central role in the establishment and creation of New Chinatown, and Tyrus Wong (1910-2016), one of the most prominent Chinese American artists in the US. The exhibition centers this numinous painting as a richly layered nexus that draws together the life and work of these icons, situated within the genesis of New Chinatown and the racial and political landscape of the late 1930s.