Bernice Bing
Bernice Bing (10 April 1936 – 18 August 1998) was a Chinese American lesbian artist involved in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the 1960s.Bernice Bing was a co-founder of San Francisco’s SCRAP, according to the 2013 film about her life[3] and an article in the SF City College Guardsman.After graduating from Oakland Technical High School in 1955, she received a National Scholastic Award to the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) initially as an advertising major, then later as a painting one.A Japanese-born painter, Hasegawa introduced Bing to Zen Buddhism, Chinese philosophers, including Lao Tzu and Po Chu-i, and traditional calligraphy.[3] Her wider circle of friends, many of which were prominent Bay Area abstract painters, included Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner and Fred Martin.[4] In 1961, San Francisco’s Batman Gallery, an alternative Beat space with all black walls and located at 2222 Fillmore (named by poet Michael McClure and painter Bruce Conner), mounted her one-person exhibition Paintings & Drawings by Bernice Bing, which garnered praise from critics like Alfred Frankenstein from the San Francisco Chronicle.From 1984 to 85, Bing traveled to Korea, Japan and China, studying traditional Chinese ink landscape painting at the Zhejiang Art Academy in Haungzhou.[11] In 1977, Bing created an art workshop with the Baby Wah Chings, a Chinatown gang, after the Golden Dragon Massacre in San Francisco.[1][14] In her art’s bridge between East and West, Bing cited an early exposure to existential philosophy that led to her pursuit of abstraction, combined with a broad array of artistic, literary, film and musical influences characteristic of the postwar fifties: from Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, to Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.