For a Father and Son, Getty as Muse

Henry Lien: I write speculative fiction, which is a fancy way to say science fiction and fantasy without the geek cooties. I use the Getty museums as writing cafés and portals into other worlds.

My books thrust readers into unfamiliar places. Take Peasprout Chen, my Asian fantasy series. In it, a young girl leaves her homeland to study at a foreign boarding school teaching a very unusual art form, combining figure skating with kung fu. The New York Times described it as “Hermione Granger meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets the Ice Capades meets Mean Girls.” Art has the power to transport us somewhere far.

The Getty Villa is a time machine to a world that otherwise exists only as remnants of past grandeur. The Getty Center is a time machine that rockets back and forth through centuries. You’ve got maybe my all-time favorite Rembrandt painting (An Old Man in Military Costume) enshrined in a campus resembling Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy. These museums are atomizers that render time and space deliciously porous, and reality negotiable. I gather my UCLA Writers’ Program science fiction/fantasy students to write at the Getty museums because these spaces demonstrate what we strive to do in words. We can sit in another world around us while we imagine another world within us.

Fong-Chi Lien: I was born in Taiwan to a very humble family during World War II, when Taiwan was under American bombardment. When I came to the US, I first washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant. I did not have much education, experience, or English ability. Coming here was difficult, but not without kindness. Eventually, based on my skills, the Associated Press hired me as an electrical engineer. I treasured the opportunity America offered.

I worked for the Associated Press for over 30 years, eventually winning its highest honor, a Gramling Award. When I retired, I thought I would live quietly because the most interesting part of my life was already over.

At the time, my son, Henry, had transitioned from being a lawyer to an art gallery owner. I did not understand this career change. But he exposed me to ideas about art, such as composition, negative space, and the relationship between form and substance. My eyes grew wider and wider. In Taiwan, someone like me did not have the luxury of learning about art. I grew up in a corrugated tin shack with a dirt floor and a mother who had to do manual labor despite having bound feet. Here was a second chance.

Having been an engineer, photography made sense to me since it was art that came through machines. I applied my technical mind to the concepts I learned from my son. Soon, he said I was “ready,” meaning he thought I was good enough to include one of my photographs in a group exhibition at his gallery. When I arrived, he told me my photograph was the first artwork to sell. A young man with a blue mohawk and skateboard came into the gallery, saw it, and said, “I have to have that.”

Within two years, I became my son’s top-selling artist. My artwork has been exhibited and acquired for institutional, corporate, and museum collections. I guess I was wrong about retirement being quiet and the most interesting part of my life being over. My son now calls me “The Artist Formerly Known as Dad.”

Why do I love photographing the Getty museums? When my family and I arrived in this country, we could not afford things like ski vacations or dinners in restaurants. But the art and history museums were affordable or free, so I always took the family there. We didn’t always understand what we saw, but I never forgot that America made opportunities for culture available to everyone. Thus, the museums represented some of the beautiful hope of my immigrant experience.

My current photograph series is entitled Yellow and is accomplished with infrared cameras. Because infrared captures colors the human eye cannot see, you must assign a color to represent the unseeable shades.

I chose yellow. I wanted to reclaim yellow from its negative associations with cowardice and its use as a racist slur. I also chose yellow to embrace the idea of California as the “Gold Mountain” of immigrant dreams.