It’s the second day of our vacation here in Chicago, and we’re quickly turning into porky pigs from our mom’s food. But in between the munchies, we found time to visit an art studio where our parents’ artist friends were painting a mural backdrop for an upcoming play.
After some arm-twisting, the two of us found ourselves picking up smocks and paintbrushes!
The WhoToo Art Club is a collective of painters, sculptors, potters, photographers and other creators of visual art.
Definition. ‘collective’: /noun/ A leaderless resistance, characterized by attempts to share and exercise political and social power and to make decisions on a consensus-driven and egalitarian basis.
Our dad was honored to be one of 4 co-founders of the collective, which includes a handful of the most gracious and unrealistically selfless people who love art and love dedicating their free time to it. Funny enough, ‘WhoToo’ has a double meaning in Taiwanese. It refers to someone who’s spacey and airheaded, and also describes someone who’s artistically carefree…
Here’s 3 of them. So cute!
Dr. Wu (left, doing the Richard Nixon haha) is a doctor, prosthetician, sculptor and painter who’s made prosthetic limbs for victims of land mines and war. Mr. Lekki (center) is a brilliant painter and photographer who’s done billboards and who first requested to meet our dad after he took a liking to his disarming and childlike artwork. Dr. Wang (right) is a physicist, painter and master of Taoism and other philosophies. Mrs. Hwang, also a co-founder, was unfortunately not present for the mural session because she was in the middle of moving.
When we got there, they had spent the whole day finishing up the backdrop. Paint was everywhere.
Here’s a little glimpse of the painting when we first arrived. While Mr. Lekki prepares the canvas…
…we don an apron and a big bubbly astronaut-like suit, climb atop a table and put our marks on the painting!
Em in blue, and me in red. Luckily, the picture was supposed to be an abstract painting on a pretend wall, so there was no way we could really ruin it with our amateur strokes, phew. 
Then Mama Hsu joins in on the fun!
Posing proudly for photos after making our meager contribution, hee.
Here are some more spectacular murals by the WhoToo’s:
ohhhh so beautiful suz n em
Are all the red and blue marks on the final product you guys?
i did the red marks and em did the blue. the green was already there. it actually doesn’t look bad i don’t think. very bold colors. then again it’s hard to mess up a painting like that!