Jake Lee, a Chinese-American artist who studied in Oakland and who died in 1991, made 12 works for the then-glamorous Kan's Restaurant in 1959. The poster-size watercolors hung in the Chinatown establishment for more than 30 years, but in the early '90s, they disappeared. During DWT's Fall PRSIM event, Sue Lee, Executive Director of San Francisco's Chinese Historical Society of America, told a modern day detective story about how she solved a mystery that had stumped scholars of Chinese-American art for decades: the case of the missing Jake Lee paintings.
San Francisco's Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) is the oldest and largest organization in the country dedicated to the documentation, study, and presentation of Chinese American history.