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Long Tack Sam poster by Adolph Friedlander
1919
- Classification
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- National Portrait Gallery (United States), Object Number NPG.2016.115
- Rights
- CC0, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
About this work
1919 colour lithograph poster, 95 × 71.6 cm (37 3/8 × 28 3/16"), for Long Tack Sam, printed in Hamburg, Germany. Per the National Portrait Gallery:
[Long Tack Sam,] Born Cangzhou, China After training as an acrobat and magician in his native China, Long Tack Sam journeyed to the United States and became one of vaudeville’s brightest stars. Although he was based in New York from about 1900 and performed primarily in the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act denied him the possibility of U.S. citizenship and kept him on the move. He performed in South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. As a Chinese man competing against a slew of fake-Asian magicians in “yellow-face,” Long Tack Sam was in a paradoxical position. This poster illustrates his conscious use of luxurious embroidered costumes and elaborate scenery to enhance his mystique and capitalize on Western notions of “the mysterious Orient.” Yet he also wrote newspaper articles correcting Western misconceptions of his homeland, and he refused invitations to appear in early Hollywood films featuring negatively stereotyped Chinese opium addicts and laundry workers.
