Abstract Expressionism to art students. Bing spent six weeks studying Chinese calligraphy with Wang Dong Ling and Chinese landscape painting with Professor Yang at the Zhejiang Art Academy in Hangzhou, China. She was profoundly impacted by the experience, struck by the “vastness of the country” as well as the architecture, in particular the Imperial Courts and Summer Palace. Later career After returning from her travels, Bing moved from San Francisco to Philo, a hamlet in Mendocino County, California. She initially worked as a waitress and cook in order to support herself. In 1989, Bing's career was revitalized after meeting Moira Roth, a professor of art history at Mills College who suggested that Bing join the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA). Bing's participation in the AAWAA helped her to incorporate her interest with identity into her art. Final years Bing was selected by the National Women Caucus for the Arts Visual Arts Honor Award in 1996, in partnership with a group exhibition at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She died in Philo in 1998 from cancer. Art and influence In her art’s bridge between East and West, Bing cited an early exposure to existential philosophy that led to her pursuit of abstraction, combined with a broad array of artistic, literary, film and musical influences characteristic of the postwar fifties: from Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, to Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Like many postwar abstractionists, she recognized the prominence of Zen Buddhism and followed author Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Zen’s Western authority. In her later years she devoted her practice to Nichiren Buddhism, a branch of Buddhism based on the teachings of the 13th-century Japanese monk Nichiren (1222–1282). Her work Mayacamas, No. 6, March 12, 1963 (1963) is held by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. It was inspired by the Mayacamas Mountains of Northern California. The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California has a promised gift by Bing, a large oil-on-canvas titled Velázquez Family (1961). In 2013, a documentary film, The Worlds of Bernice Bing, was co-produced by the Asian American Women Artists Association and Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project ; Produced and Directed by Madeleine Lim; Co-Produced by Jennifer Banta Yoshida and T. Kebo Drew. In 2022-23, the Asian Art Museum hosted a show of her work. References 1936 births 1998 deaths Artists