While the title of Yee Jan Bao’s oil painting ‘The Diver’ suggests that the diver is the subject of the work, but Bao’s paintings concentrate more on the painted environment, with the tiny figures strategically positioned to help describe the space. Here, Bao’s impressionistic background of swirling colors with washes of black, beige, and blue is defined as a landscape, with the sky, horizon line, land, and road being identified by the small diver and his diving board, the trees set against a pool, and car zooming in from the left. While each of these miniatures almost blends into their surroundings, their impact on the whole of the composition is immense.

Oakland based painter Yee Jan Bao paints vast landscapes that while devoid of any distinguishing feature, are given a sense of life by the tiny figures and objects that define the scenes. The recipient of numerous grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, Bao is a dedicated teacher and is a faculty member at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Represented by Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA, Bao has exhibited at PS1, Long Island City, NY; the New Museum, New York, NY; Stephen Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY; and the City of Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL. A solo show of his work, ‘Painted Histories’, was held at Bucheon Gallery, San Francisco, CA in 2005. His work is also held in the collection of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA.