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Thursday, October 14, 1999

Picture Imperfect

Businessman Bill Jue organized photo exhibit to honor the artist his father might have been

Listen to Bill Jue talk about his father's photography
in English and in Cantonese.

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Photo by Donald Y. Jue

Donald Jue posed for a self-portrait by a body of water in Chicago where he sometimes fished.

Donald Jue cooked Chinese food in his father's restaurant for 30 years. On Sundays, he escaped the drudgery of 12-hour workdays with a roving eye that captured the people and places of Chicago in black and white photography.
On his only day off, Jue took a Leica camera and traveled the streets of Chicago, returning at night with a 35-millimeter record of the artist he might have been had his life not been sacrificed to his father and his own children.
His son, Bill Jue, a 49-year-old Corpus Christi shoe retailer, has honored his father in death, as he might have wanted to be seen in life.
"He was not an outgoing man, but he was very creative, an artist," said Bill Jue, who organized a museum exhibit of his father's photographs. The exhibit, which opened on the fifth anniversary of Donald Jue's death at age 64, will continue through Nov. 6 at the Asian Cultures Museum and Educational Center.
Donald Jue never spoke to his family about the one hobby that gave him refuge from a miserable life under his father's thumb, Bill Jue said. Donald Jue's training came from a mail order course in photography.
Jue's photographs spoke for him, said Greg Spaulding, a fine arts photographer who volunteered to curate the exhibit. "Through the photographs, he communicated with his kids that he wanted to be an artist. It took this long for him to have a show."

Family and sadness

Photo by Donald Y. Jue

"Shining Path,' taken at a park in Chicago, mirrors the solitude of the photographer,' said Gregory Spaulding, curator of the Donald Jue photography exhibit.

The initial purpose of the exhibit was to document the Asian-American immigrant experience in Chicago in the 1960s, Jue said.
But a meaning entirely different and intensely personal grew out of the 6-month-long project, Jue said.
"We were going to use the photos as a fund-raiser to draw attention to Asian cultures," said Jue, who is selling the work to raise money for the museum. "But it turned into a family type of thing. It brought my whole family together. My mom, all of us, were very emotional and sad at the opening."
The images reflect his father's sadness, perhaps at the loss of a once-promising life in Canton, China, Bill Jue said. Fifty years ago this month, communists completed their takeover of China, and eliminated all private enterprise. The Jues, a wealthy Cantonese family, lost everything.
"They're not happy photographs, except possibly in the portraits of his family," Spaulding said. "You see a lot of solitude."
Before the communist takeover, Donald Jue led a life of privilege in Canton. He had married young into a wealthy family, which gave him the chance to explore artistic pursuits and compete in sports.
Well-liked in college, Donald Jue was an acrobat and played the violin so well that he might have turned professional, his son Bill said.

Opportunity lost

Photo by Donald Y. Jue

Chicago Restaurateur Tony G. Jue, with his granddaughter Mae Jue, Bill Jue's sister.

But those opportunities ended on Oct. 1, 1949, when communist leader Mao Tse-tung declared the founding of the People's Republic of China.
The communists had won a protracted war with the ruling Nationalists, whose forces were led by the United States-backed Chiang Kai-shek. Many Chinese fled to Taiwan. Others, like Donald Jue's family in Canton, sought refuge in the British colony of Hong Kong. Jue's father-in-law lost his vast business holdings in Canton.
Donald Jue's own father had emigrated to the United States 25 years earlier, in 1925. Tony G. Jue saved his money to open a Chinese restaurant in the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove.
Donald Jue's father worked hard to bring his son's family from Hong Kong to the United States.
Ten years it took for Donald Jue, his wife and now six children, to legally immigrate here.
While America would offer countless opportunities for his children, Donald Jue knew that, at age 35, his life was over.
"My dad knew he would have to give his life to my grandfather and work for him for the rest of his life," Bill Jue said. "That was his payback for my grandfather bringing the family there."
Bill Jue describes his father as less a son than an indentured servant. His grandfather did not forgive the debts he felt were owed him. He was also stubborn.
"My grandfather was not an educated man," Jue said. "He believed in hard work, and that you sacrifice your life to work for one cause, and you do that under any circumstances."

A sensitive man

John Kennedy/Caller-Times

Bill Jue stands in front of his father's nature photography at an exhibit he organized at the Asian Cultures Museum to pay tribute to his father's artistry.

Curator Spaulding said it wasn't too hard to glean a representative sampling of Jue's father's work from 2,000 negatives.
Spaulding also printed and framed the photographs, some from negatives that had deteriorated.
Behind the photographs of city streets, people, flowers and parks, was a sensitive man, Spaulding discovered, while working for one month on the project.
"I could tell from the negatives that he had a love of nature and an introspective streak in him. He didn't have any formal training, but he was a natural and had a good eye for composition."
Spauding sensed that photography was Donald Jue's escape, particularly in the close-up images of flowers. "Photography is escapism. And when you do a lot of macro photography, you are looking into things and escaping the big picture.

Photo by Donald Y. Jue

Bill Jue (right) as a teen-ager in Chicago, with his two cousins Richard (center) and David Lee, worked in his grandfather's restaurant in a Chicago suburb.

"The darkroom can also be a refuge," Spaulding said. "It is absolutely dark and quiet. You can mold your environment and be very selective about what you see in the dark." One set of negatives disturbed Bill Jue in particular, the shoe retailer said. A series of experiments in double images and blurriness might have reflected a nervous breakdown late in his father's life. "I knew at that stage of his life, he was not very stable," said Jue, who sees his father, "crying out for help" in the blurred images.
The elder Jue shot photographs until three years before his death. He outlived his father by only nine months.
"I was the closest to my dad," Bill Jue said. "To me the exhibit reflects how my father, who slaved away six days and six nights in that restaurant, could transcend to another level in another medium."
"I think my dad could have been good at anything," Jue said. "But the opportunities were not there for him."

You can contact Bill Jue at William@ciris.net

Caller-Times staff writer Ellen Bernstein can be reached at 886-3763 or by e-mail at bernsteine@caller.com

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