The Colour of Colour
In 1901, as Pablo Picasso journeyed into his Blue period, an aspiring artist working in a laundry in Winnipeg told a Canadian census enumerator that he was 23 years old and had been born in 1877 in China, and that he had immigrated to Canada in 1898.1 That young man, Lee Youk Tien (李玉田, literally “Jade Fields”), would take on the sobriquet Tie Fu (铁夫, literally “Iron Man”), using that name to sign the oil paintings he began to paint. On that 1901 census sheet, he and his roommate are classified with the colour “yellow,” while every one of their neighbours is classified with the colour “white.”in Matthew Wong, Blue View, 2021
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