Name Mai-Mai Sze | Role Writer | |
 | ||
Died July 16, 1992, New York City, New York, United States Books The tao of painting, Chin: Toward a Democratic Foreign Policy, Reference Pamphlet | ||
Yuen Tsung Sze (December 2, 1909 – July 16, 1992) — known as Mai-mai Sze — was a Chinese-American painter and writer. The Bollingen Foundation first published her translation of the Jieziyuan Huazhuan or The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting with her commentary in 1956.
Contents
Early life
Mai-mai Sze was born Yuen Tsung Sze in Tianjin on December 2, 1909. Mai-mai is a nickname meaning "little sister," and this was the name under which she published all of her books. In 1915 she moved to London with her father Alfred Sao-ke Sze, then the Chinese Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The family lived there until 1921, when Alfred Sao-ke Sze was appointed Chinese Ambassador to the United States and settled in Washington D.C. Mai-mai Sze moved there with him and attended the National Cathedral School until 1927, when she enrolled at Wellesley College. At Wellesley, Sze studied the humanities, including English literature and composition, religion, philosophy, European history, and art. She graduated in 1931.
Career
Following her graduation from Wellesley, Mai-mai Sze's primary activity appears to have been painting. She exhibited a landscape in the 1933 Salon d'Automne, and also with Marie Sterner Galleries. Sze also worked as a graphic designer. In a letter to Dorothy Norman, Sze wrote: "I started... as a painter, did a lot of illustrating, ads, designs for packaging, materials, wallpapers...." She illustrated her autobiography, Echo of a Cry. In the same letter to Norman, Sze mentions working also in theater. She made her first and only appearance as an actress in 1936, playing the Honorable Reader in Lady Precious Stream by Hsiung Shih-I.
Sze was notably photographed by several important artists, including Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, and Dorothy Norman. Some of these photographs were published in fashion magazines including Vogue; it is unclear whether or not modeling was one facet of her career.
Sze also engaged in political affairs as an active advocate for war relief in China, and as writer and speaker on foreign relations with the Far East. In 1944, she published a pamphlet on China, the second in the International Relations Series published by Western Reserve University Press, at the request of Dorothy Norman. During the Second Sino-Japanese War and throughout World War II, Sze traveled in America lecturing on China and organized the Chinese War Relief Committee in New York. She also published a regular column, "East-West" in the New York Post during this time.
There is little documentation of Sze's relationship with the costume designer Irene Sharaff. The two women were living together at the time of Sze's death in 1992, and they coordinated the donation of their personal collections of books to the New York Society Library together, in 1989. In his history of the Bollingen Foundation, William McGuire wrote that Sze and Sharaff were both students of Natacha Rambova, who held private classes in comparative religion, symbolism, and Theosophy in her New York apartment in the 1930s.
Mai-mai Sze died in New York Hospital on July 16, 1992, at age 82.