The subway station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan is a four-block-long concrete artery. Tens of thousands of people push through the beeping turnstiles every morning. Hedge fund executives elbow their way through crowds of weary commuters from New Jersey, who brush past dazed tourist families trying to find their way to Times Square. An impatient human murmur and the heavy rumble of trains below echo off the walls.
Tucked in a far corner is a small, rhomboid storefront. Below small track lamps lining the top of the glass enclosure walls hang oil-paint portraits: of a young, short-haired woman with an uncertain smile; of Albert Einstein, looming with large brown eyes; of a newlywed couple, glowing. The stenciling on the door reads: “Sung Portrait Painting.”
Ki Yong Sung, 73, with thin black hair protruding from under a dark baseball cap, arrives around 8:30 in the morning. It’s a few weeks before Christmas, and business is brisk. He puts on a smock and places a CD in the player. Mozart. It helps him relax and dulls the noise of the trains. He sits down on a low stool in front of his easel. He begins to paint. The easel is positioned so that the canvas faces out, toward the window and the concourse beyond. Anyone who passes by can peek over Sung’s shoulder and see what he’s working on.
Slowly, in ones and twos, people break off from the moving crowd, wander over to the store and linger.
“It is an odd place for a studio,” Sung agrees, with a chuckle.
I’m sitting on the stool next to him. He’s turned from the portrait of a blushing, middle-aged Hispanic couple he was working on to talk to me.
Sung, who seems to laugh after every other sentence, has been painting under 42nd Street since he lost the lease on another storefront downtown. The few other stores that line the long gray hall sell cheap T-shirts and Spanish-language newspapers. He picked the location because the price was right, and with the inherent traffic, he never has to advertise. I ask him how he got started painting portraits. From across the small room, his niece Sue Jong Lee, who helps him run the shop, answers.
“He was born talented,” she says. Sung nods.
Born and raised in Seoul, he loved to doodle ever since primary school. He was in his second year of art college in 1950 when the Korean War broke out and ended his education. To support his widowed mother and sister, Sung visited American military bases and solicited jobs. The GIs gave him snapshots of girlfriends and parents back home, and Sung painted them.
Devastating wars are not generally remembered this way, but Sung has a fond expression on his face as he speaks. All the Americans knew him. He could go to any base, and they’d wave him in. The soldiers paid him in coupons that allowed him to buy cheap cartons of Lucky Strikes from the base store — cartons he sold on the black market for a 1,000-percent profit. It was the most money he’d made in his life.
