Upon his retirement Tyrus Wong rediscovered a childhood love…flying kites. He designed and handmade all of his kites with bamboo, rattan, rip-stop nylon and string. He would joyously fill the sky at Santa Monica Beach with his designs: a fantastical menagerie consisting of flocks of Butterflies, Owls, Cranes, Swallows, schools of fish, perhaps a running panda, and on a day with good wind, a hundred foot long centipede. Tyrus was a painter, muralist, lithographer, greeting card designer, film production illustrator and kite maker. Born on October 25, 1910 in a farming village in Guangdong Province, China together with his father, he left China for the United States as a boy of nine years. After a few years in Sacramento, in his early teens,
