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Arts & Entertainment

USPS Artist Kam Mak Brings His Chinese Heritage to Life

The Carroll Gardens illustrator created the upcoming Year of the Dragon stamp for the United States Postal Service.

For the Chinese, the dragon symbolizes luck and success. It is represented by the dragon dance, which is usually performed during the Lunar New Year to chase away wickedness. The performance features several dancers carrying and maneuvering a very long serpent-like costume.

Carroll Gardens-based illustrator Kam Mak chose the head of the dragon dance costume for his latest painting that will appear on the upcoming commemorative stamp Celebrating the Lunar New Year for the United States Postal Service. It is tentatively scheduled to be released on Jan. 23, 2012, the first day of the Year of the Dragon.

“I want the dragon to be what I see during the Lunar New Year,” Mak, 50, says from his home studio. “That’s the papier mache dragon where there’s 50 people prancing around with them. So I started researching and I wanted to use the real thing. I got a lion and dragon troupe in Chinatown to actually perform the dance for me. I shot lots of pictures—I took those references and compiled them into a sketch and that’s what I came up with. It was fun to paint."

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Mak says the dragon represent strength.

“People always ask me, ‘But dragons are scary.’ I’d say Chinese dragons are very different from Western dragons. Its strength is protection. In some way, we are spreading our culture and they’re learning.”

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So far Mak’s paintings have appeared on a total of five Lunar New Year stamps since 2008, and he has seven more works for the stamp series through 2019.  A common theme that runs through his works is his Chinese heritage. Mak grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown after arriving from Hong Kong with his family in 1971, and he has authored and illustrated a book titled “My Chinatown: One Year in Poems.”

“I’m fascinated by my own culture,” he says. “I did a series of paintings of these animals at how our culture displayed them. My Chinese culture has influenced me in every way, even though subtle.”

Mak's works are detailed and marked by their warm quality and bright colors. He cites the masters such as Vermeer and Van Eyck as influences.

“I always love the detail in those works that these artists possess. The reason they look very vibrant and luminous is the technique that I use: a lot of glazing. It means painting very transparent color and letting all the color bounce back to you through the light. It’s a very tedious technique and it also takes a long time to master. But I like to play with shadows and light.”

Mak had pursued art since he was a child—in Hong Kong, people would pay him a nickel to draw whatever they wanted. He admits that he wasn’t a grade-A student, except in drawing. His earliest works were two murals while as a student at a Chinatown middle school.

“One of them was on a Chinese theater at Hester and Bowery with the dragon,” he says. “The theme was to tell the story of the Chinese immigrant in this country. I must have been 16. It was a great a memory. And we got paid for doing that.”

It was when Mak attended LaGuardia High School that his passion for art got deeper and he started to get some direction.

“When I was young—I didn’t know what [an illustrator] was. But everyone knows Norman Rockwell. That was the guy: ‘Wow, I wanted to be like him.’ I didn’t know any of the contemporary illustrators because I didn’t know what the career was until I went to college. I just wanted to be a painter like Rembrandt and Vermeer. So those are the people I admired."

Mak, whose art has appeared on book covers and magazines, had already been working for 20 years when he was contacted by USPS art director Ethel Kessler to work on a commemorative stamp depicting the koi fish. However, that project hit a snag.

“News came back to me from her that there was a lot of politics behind the koi,” he recalls. “The koi is considered an Asian carp that is a pest in some states. Some say they didn’t want it to be a commemorative stamp. [The Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee’s] decision was, ‘Sorry Kam, this is not going to be a commemorative stamp. While working on the koi art, [Ethel] said, ‘The USPS decided to renew the Lunar New Year stamp [series] and I think you might be perfect for it. I want you to come up with some ideas.’”

For the Year of the Rat stamp, Mak originally came up with sketches featuring a rat, but they didn’t click. Then he tried a different approach by not featuring the animal as the main figure, but rather a Chinese lantern.

“I always grew up with the Chinese zodiac,” he says, “but to me, the Lunar New Year is more than that. I told Ethel, ‘How about all the Lunar New Year elements that I grew up with that surrounded me since I could remember, like the red lantern that my mother decorate on the window sill, the red envelope, the lion dance, the candy tray?’

 “She presented it [to the committee] and they loved the idea because they felt it was different. They came to me that they wanted me to do it. I was so excited. I get to do something that’s more than just doing a project that I love, but it’s so part of my life and that makes it even more exciting. From then on, I started working on it, and they gave me all 12 contracts.”

Mak works in a studio in his Carroll Gardens home, where he has lived for almost 20 years since moving from Chinatown. His introduction to the neighborhood was by means of his BMW motorcycle, which he says was his freedom out of Chinatown.

“I had a bunch of friends and we hung out on Sackett Street and Hicks," he recalls. "We all hung out at [this BMW] mechanic’s shop. Two of my biker friends were living between Henry and Clinton. When I got married...we felt that living in that tenement might not be a good idea to have a kid, [it was] too small."

Mak says Carroll Gardens is a great neighborhood and loves it because everybody knows everybody.

"Smith Street was abandoned...this was 1992,” he remembers. “We looked at almost 100 houses—even at that time I thought it was a lot of money. We said, 'We could make a life here.' We found this house...after a year, we bought [it].”

Even though the Celebrate the Lunar New Year stamp series will continue on for a couple of more years, Mak says he has already completed the last painting for it. He learned that the project represented more than just a stamp, especially to the Chinese community.

“One of the ex-presidents of the Organization of Chinese Americans, when I was in San Francisco, pulled me over and said, ‘This stamp means a lot to all of us. It’s not just a stamp to mail something, you are telling a story about our culture to all over the world. It symbolizes what we have given to America [and] Americans are paying homage and respect to what we have given them through this stamp.”

He experienced a similar reaction when he did an outdoor stamp signing event on a cold day in Chinatown when the Year of the Ox stamp went on sale in 2009.

“I was freezing,” he recalls. “I was so shocked that little stamp pulled together so many people that day. They bought everything on the [USPS mobile] truck. People were proud not really [for] me, but seeing the face of a Chinese artist illustrating that stamp and knowing what that stamp meant to them. It was unbelievable, it blew me away.”

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