Winning Ways - Page 2

From a two-man pottery shop, Taylor & Ng blossomed into an iconic Bay Area design brand that won national attention, with two South of Market Taylor & Ng stores on Howard Street, a two-level, 35,000-square-foot emporium at the Embarcadero Center, stores in the Castro District and at Stanford Shopping Center, and even an outlet at Macy's in New York.

"And we were selling to 10,000 stores," Taylor remembers. "So it turned into a real business."

"I don't think they really understood that it would turn into this big wholesale company," says Tony Manglicmot, a longtime friend of Ng's, and Taylor's husband. "It was going down the road of Williams-Sonoma and the different big housewares companies, with a quirky Chinese Asian flare to it, which was brand new to the market at that point."

"The reason I was doing ceramics was to support my painting, but the ceramics kind of overtook everything, so I didn't paint for years," Taylor says.

"Win never talked about it," says his younger brother, Herman Ng. "But fine art was where his real soul was."

While never leaving fine arts entirely, Ng, who continued to show sculpture through the 1960s and created a mural for the Orinda BART station in 1971, was soon being referred to in the press not as a sculptor but as an 'importer.'

But this is no tale of artists selling their souls for lucre. Even as Taylor & Ng grew, the company remained a kind of art project.

"We liked what we were doing, basically," Taylor says. "We had some outlet for our aesthetics."

Natalie Ng, Ng's sister-in-law who served as Taylor & Ng's comptroller and chief operating officer (and later became an artist, inspired by Win), loves the whimsy in Ng's designs.

Examples are the drawings Win created for his popular mugs, trivets, aprons, and more: your standard two-hump camels looking askance at a beaming companion with three humps, a prancing terrier carrying a kitten in a bucket, polar bears at play.

Business was not an alien concept for Ng, whose given name was Winfred. As a teen, Ng earned needed cash for the family by making and selling enameled tie clips, cufflinks, and the like.

Throughout the Taylor & Ng era, both artists designed products, with Win designing ads, illustrations for cookbooks, and more.

Mimi Hicks, 13 years younger than her brother, remembers watching him as a young artist, back home after he served with the Army in France.

"After dinner on the kitchen table he would take black ink, India ink I think, and create drawings on newsprint with a Chinese brush," she says. "They were doodles, drawings, and I would watch. It was just effortless and very flowing."

"He was doing what he felt he needed to do," Mimi says of his work for Taylor & Ng, adding that Ng enjoyed "the whimsicalness of it. The enthusiasm he received, the positive feedback for his creations, the bunnies and the bears."

Whimsy was part of Ng's personality.

"Being a gay man," Mimi says, "he would be a little outrageous, to put it mildly."

"He was the type of person that if he walked into a party or a crowd, people would eventually gravitate towards him," Manglicmot says.