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City spending of taxpayer dollars on Chinese water tiger art at two Portland festivals climbed to $60,000 over eight months, according to records newly obtained by WW.
As the newspaper reported last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler’s chief of staff, Bobby Lee, first shepherded $30,000 in taxpayer dollars to a water tiger mural (and other related pieces) created by a former girlfriend’s teenage niece last summer. The water tiger is a symbol of power and courage in Chinese culture.
Additional records produced by Prosper Portland, the city agency that released the money for the mural to the Waterfront Blues Festival in 2023, show it also sent $30,000 to another event—the Portland Winter Light Festival—to display water tiger art by the same teenage artist, once again at the direction of Lee.
A spokeswoman for the light festival, Therese Gietler, says it submitted a proposal to Lee in December 2023, at his request, in which it pitched two water tiger ideas. The festival wrote in the proposal, which Prosper provided a copy of, that its event “embodies the ethos of the Water Tiger.”
That brought total taxpayer dollars spent on creating water tiger art, at the request of Lee, to $60,000 over the course of the two events.
Lee, who is Asian American, first adopted the water tiger as the city’s unofficial mascot in 2022 as the city sought to piece itself back together after COVID-19. His girlfriend at the time was a policy staffer in City Commissioner Mingus Mapps’ office, and Lee says he met her teenage niece during a bring-your-kid-to-work day. The young artist, apparently inspired by a speech Lee gave about the water tiger, sketched a design. Lee was enamored and, six months later, instructed the Waterfront Blues Festival to use $30,000 in Prosper Portland dollars to display the girl’s art at its 2023 festival.
By May of this year, the mural had moved to the Portland Building downtown. But when the city’s Office of Arts and Culture took the mural down in May so a $400,000 art installation behind it could be repaired, Lee accused the office in a series of emails of disrespecting Asian American culture and charged that removing the mural was illegal.
At one point in the email exchange, Lee requested a $40,000 grant from the Arts and Culture Office for his ex-girlfriend’s niece to create more water tiger pieces. Lee never received the money and said last week in a statement: “I agree that it should go through a competitive process.”
Neither Lee nor the mayor’s office responded to a request for comment.