Chinatown at Night, New York

Chinatown at Night, New York (夜のチャイナタウン、ニューヨーク) is a 1922 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted during his Art Students League years in New York under the direct instruction of John Sloan and squarely within the Ashcan tradition of New York street observation. The composition shows a night view of the lower Manhattan Chinatown around Pell, Doyers, or Mott Street, with illuminated shopfronts, gathered pedestrians in winter coats, and the deep darks of the unlit upper façades reading against a more luminous street level. The dark, modulated palette and the unforced compositional structure are typical of Sloan's late-Ashcan teaching, and Shimizu's choice of Chinatown as subject reads as a deliberate Issei observation of an immigrant Asian-American enclave from the unusual perspective of a Japanese national who was himself an immigrant — a doubled vantage that distinguishes his New York paintings from those of his American Ashcan contemporaries. The painting is one of a group of New York street scenes that he exhibited in 1921-22, the year in which a prize he had won at a major exhibition was rescinded after the jury learned he was a Japanese citizen rather than an American one. The work is now in the collection of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in his home prefecture, the principal institutional custodian of his American-period paintings, and it is in the public domain in Japan and reproduced on Wikimedia Commons.