Michael Chow
Arts and Culture Visionary; Artist and Restauranteur
Michael Chow is an artist and restaurateur who has enriched the cultural life of Los Angeles by fusing art, architecture, design and cuisine. He was born in Shanghai into a theater family. His father, Zhou Xinfang, was the grandmaster of Beijing Opera and is still regarded as a national treasure. In his early years, Michael (Zhou Yinghua) developed a passion for the creativity and spontaneity of Beijing Opera and dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps.
At the age of 13, however, he was uprooted and sent to London. Having lost everything familiar, even his Chinese name, Michael turned to painting as a medium of creative expression. In 1956, he studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the following year at the Hammersmith School of Building and Architecture. He painted vigorously for the next decade, yet despite exhibiting his work in one-man and group shows, Michael struggled to build a career. Still feeling the loss of his Chinese identity, he had an “internal desire to connect the East and West,” and thus MR CHOW was born. Michael opened his first restaurant in 1968 in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge neighborhood. From the start, it combined high culture – refined Chinese cuisine as never seen before in the West and fine art – and pop culture, attracting the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
As MR CHOW expanded to Beverly Hills, New York and beyond over the past 50 years, Michael fulfilled his vision of celebrating Chinese culture and building bridges to the West. Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and other leading artists gathered at MR CHOW, befriended Michael and honored him by painting portraits of him and his family. Michael sees his restaurants as a dining experience and long-running musical. Contemporary art gallerist Jeffrey Deitch calls each MR CHOW a “total work of art.”
Michael returned to the art of painting in 2011 after what he described as a radical sabbatical. In 2015, “Voice For My Father,” Michael’s homage to his father, exhibited at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, followed by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2016. Michael’s works are in numerous private collections and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.