The artful life of Leland Wong

“I’ve been playing around with the image of the koi and the dragon for a while,” Wong tells me. “You can feel the energy from it, how they’re fighting through the water, the strength of the koi going against the stream, finally being greeted by a beautiful dragon at the top.” 

We’re sitting inside Edge on the Square, an arts hub perched on the corner of Grant Avenue and Clay Street in Chinatown, where Wong has several pieces on display. Dressed in his signature black beret and black-denim tangzhuang jacket, layered over a T-shirt he designed himself, Wong looks like he could be part of the exhibit: Living Artist (c. 2025). 

The shirt features his take on the logo of the old ice cream parlor Fong Fong, which he visited as a child before its closure in the mid-1970s. “WE GREW UP IN SAN FRANCISCO CHINATOWN,” reads a line under the logo. 

Wong, who turns 73 this year, has a lifetime of memories from living and working in Chinatown and Japantown. He’s rendered those recollections into reams of art, often delving into Asian iconography and tropes with both nostalgia and a subversive wit.

Wong’s work has been exhibited around the US and Europe, but his roots have always remained in the city. Locally, he’s recognized frequently for his iconic posters for the annual Nihonmachi Street Fair, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. But Wong is more than an artist. He’s a screenprinter, photographer, graphic designer, journalist, polyglot, and an understated icon of San Francisco for those in the know. 

“I always have to explain to people it took me 50 years to get here,” Wong says while gazing at the canvases. “To do it from start to finish, it takes one day or so. Just a few hours at a time. It was always a struggle in the past. It took me 50 years to be able to just sit down and do this.”

Earlier that same day, I watched as Wong shuffled into a ceremony for the opening of 41 Ross, a new gallery, shop, and venue from the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. The festivities were in full bloom: Community stars like the drag queen Panda Dulce mingled alongside former supervisor Aaron Peskin and his successor, Danny Sauter. Outside in historic Ross Alley, young performers in streaks of red and gold brought a lion costume to life, waggling its head for auspicious futures at the arts hub. 

Wong is not one to try and command a room. He quietly took a seat at the back of the shop, gazing upon the buzz with a look of contentment verging on boredom. Everyone who knows him, meanwhile, reacted with surprise and admiration. Fellow Chinatown artist Jeanette Lazam, whose history in the community stretches back to the 1970s, took the opportunity to catch up with Wong as they sat with cups of milk tea, surrounded by their paintings and sketches. 

Lazam was one the original Filipina tenant-activists of the International Hotel, where all residents were evicted in 1977 to make way for redevelopment at the site. She only picked up drawing a decade ago, but has been observing Wong all along, intrigued and inspired by his themes and recognizable style.

“It’s his use of color, and his really vivid, graphical depiction of something you might call ‘Pan-Asian.’ It just attracted me to no end. I’m doing the poster for this year’s Hungry Ghost festival and I just told Leland, ‘Man, you’re a hard fuckin’ person to follow!’” Lazam told me. 

“Even though he’s disabled, he’s plugging away. We’re the only ones with walkers and berets on our heads.”

That Wong attended the 41 Ross opening was a symbolic moment for Jenny Leung, executive director of the CCCSF, who praised Wong’s artistic output and his commitment to the neighborhood.

“Leland is an OG San Francisco artist,” Leung told me. “He needs a moment to be celebrated and uplifted, because he is simply amazing.”

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A few days after the 41 Ross event, I pick up Wong at his flat on Clay Street in Polk Gulch to get lunch in Chinatown. The steps up to his modest Victorian are steep, but Wong refuses my help, choosing to lower himself down the railing bit by bit. 

“I’ve done this enough to be good at it,” he says with a wink.  

Wong doesn’t get out like he used to due to a problem with his hip and leg that’s worsened in the last few years. He says he has friends who’ve gotten  hip replacements, but he annoyedly points out that despite his disability, he doesn’t qualify for the full procedure. This means that his activity outside the home has dwindled to a few appointments a week — mostly art sessions at the Japanese Community and Cultural Center on Saturdays, and the occasional appearance for  live drawings at the Japanese restaurant TaishoSF. 

His absence from the streets explains why he gets so many excited reactions from Chinatown locals. As we roll up to his favorite restaurant, New Lun Ting Cafe, which has been operating at 670 Jackson St. since 1930, co-owner Frances Mah rushes over. 

“My favorite customer! Where have you been?” Mah declares, wagging a finger. “We miss you all the time!” 

Soon, Wong and I are enjoying one of his favorites, the roast pork plate doused with a golden curry sauce. He only gets a half portion of rice these days (“for my health”), but otherwise the meal hasn’t changed a bit from his younger days. 

Wong grew up around the corner from the cafe, in a curio and art shop at 625 Grant Ave. owned by his parents, who immigrated from the city of Taishan in China. The family lived in an apartment above the shop, and Wong still remembers the wares they sold: Asian art, certainly, but also a slew of gag gifts and novelties. “Things like rubber barf, an ashtray with a middle finger coming out of it, a joke candle marked with hours that you’re supposed to stick up your ass and light, so you can keep track of time,” Wong says with a giggle. 

“We had fine art, but I think the mix of things influenced my sense of humor. Sarcastic, kind of cynical. I like throwing pies in faces that are too serious.” 

Watching his father make lithographs of Asian subjects to sell helped spark Wong’s obsession with drawing. “It was just, wow,” he recalls. An even bigger influence was comic books, especially Marvel titles; Wong used the colorful tissue used for the shop’s gift bags as tracing paper, recreating his favorite superheroes line by line. 

Art drew his attention. A lot of other things didn’t. Wong is the first to admit his grades were middling. He couldn’t sit still in class. He routinely showed up late. In another life, Wong may have ended up where most creative troublemakers go: Art school. But, he tells me, that he didn’t want his parents paying the $600 annual tuition for a place like the Academy of Art.

 “In 1970, that was a lot of money for us,” he says. 

Instead, Wong turned to San Francisco State University, which had grown into a hotbed of radical action, marked by a mass strike by students in 1969 and the birth of an ethnic studies program designed to address fierce criticism of a curriculum that prioritized white narratives and history. He enrolled in the program and found himself immersed in Asian culture and perspectives. It reminded him of home. 

I mention to Wong that Lazam, his artist peer, had referred to him as an “activist artist.” At this, he laughs out loud, rubbing his head with a sheepish look. Wong never used that label himself, and he describes his introduction to making art for Chinatown and Japantown as a pragmatic choice: It was an outlet for his creativity and the nostalgia of his formative years, even if it dealt with serious community subjects like teacher layoffs and immigrant rights.

Perhaps his earliest signature work came in 1973, when he designed the poster for the inaugural Nihonmachi Street Fair to honor the cultural history of J-Town, fight displacement, and build young Asian Americans into leaders. He would go on to make the poster for the event until 1998 — a 25-year run that produced eye-popping, psychedelia-inflected expressions of Asianness, rife with symbols and references to Chinese and Japanese culture. 

“So in a way, I got a lot of recognition for that. Many people view it like my calling card. I don't use it as a calling card,” Wong says. “But people always recognize me for it.” 

I get the sense that Wong harbors complex feelings about this calling card, given his prodigious output in so many other mediums. 

After college, he embarked on a two-year journey through Asia, visiting Taishan (Wong himself was born in Chinatown) as well as Japan, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. He grew fascinated by the evolution of the Chinese diaspora, and how each community assimilated without losing its identity. As it turned out, he also had a penchant for language: In addition to English, Wong speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, Taishanese, Japanese, and Thai. 

When he returned to America, Wong didn’t just resume his graphic art: he painted larger works, delved into professional photography, wrote articles, and made T-shirts. All along, he evolved his modus operandi: “I cannot, just cannot, stand working some job where I have to show up at 8 a.m. every day,” he groans. “It’s a life I wasn’t, hmm… made for.”

When I call him a Renaissance man, Wong tries not to giggle while working through a bite of pork chop. 

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For someone who has produced so much idiosyncratic, beloved art, Wong admits that he has long grappled with what we now call “imposter syndrome” — the sense that, no matter what you do, it’s not quite good enough. It arises in some of Wong’s self-deprecating jabs, and how he still cringes hard at his early work. “I think I’m comfortable with maybe 20% of my posters,” Wong says, scrunching his face. “I almost can’t look at the others sometimes.”  

He seems almost embarrassed to be recognized in public, as when a bank executive interrupts our pork chop lunch to effuse about Wong’s presence in the Chinatown community and ask for a photo. Wong reluctantly complies.

Afterward, I ask how that little slice of recognition felt.

“The negative parts of me come back real quick. I still feel inadequate at times,” he says, looking down at his plate. “So I got recognized?  Did that go ‘ka-ching,’ though? Did he think about buying my art?” 

He wonders whether he should’ve spent more time marketing himself as an artist, reaching out to galleries, doing residencies, maybe moving to New York City. Perhaps he would’ve made more money? But he also felt the tug of family responsibility: To take care of his aging parents in SF. 

“It’s that Confuscian filial piety thing, isn’t it?” he says. “It runs in our veins.” 

Wong’s modesty about his body of work is surprising given the love and support it gets from observers. While at Edge on the Square, we ran into Stephen Gong, board chair and president of the Chinatown Media and Arts Collaborative. I barely got a question out before he began to gush. “I was at the Berkeley Art Museum for 16 years. I know the art business. And Leland is not the kind of artist to chase the business. He is fueled by creativity and a commitment to tell community stories,” Gong told me. “As soon as I met Leland, I knew. He’s the real deal. He’s one of the OGs.” 

Gong’s voice grew excited as he told me about Wong’s photography exhibit at the Chinese Historical Society nearly a decade ago. He still remembers seeing Wong surrounded by stacks and stacks of other shots. 

“You just see what a great eye he has. They’re all beautiful. They all tell their own stories.” 

Wong seems to be embracing that truth more and more in recent years. Making a painting like the technicolor dragon and carp comes more easily now, he says. Rather than hemming and hawing about the idea, his brain lets the ink and brushstrokes run free. 

“I’ve hit a stage where I’m comfortable with myself, where I can feel this is some of my best work. I’m not as afraid of showing it off more,” he says as we sip tea and wrap our lunch.  

Wong pauses, grins, and then drops the punchline: “The art just flows from me. Like diarrhea or something, hah!” 

Nowadays, he enjoys holing up in his home studio and occasionally cranking out pieces during live public drawings. Wong is most at peace alone, ruminating on the next line, the next shade. He is married with three adult children, but his wife isn’t much enthused by his art career, Wong admits. There’s plenty of time to work. 

I keep remembering something Lazam told me at 41 Ross right after she conversed with Wong. 

“The Chinatown art movement represents the link, the continuity, the transference of history and ideas and culture from the people who were here and the people who will be here,” she told me that night. 

There are few in the city who embody that ideal like Wong does. As we drive back from lunch, I ask him if he’ll ever retire from producing art, whether he feels tired of it at all. 

Wong shakes his head no. In fact, he tells me, he feels pressure to produce as many great pieces as he can. 

“Maybe another five years and I won’t be able to hold a brush anymore, you know?” he ponders. 

At his home, Wong again waves me off when I offer to help him up the stairs. He rises one foot at a time, then disappears behind the door — ready for another spark, another canvas, another step.