In the early 1930s, Yun Gee settled and lived mostly in New York. New York and San Francisco, of that era, were growing and thriving, each bustling with new industry and urban development. As an artist coming of age in such environments, it was no wonder that Yun Gee's art would come to focus on modern society and the emerging face of urban life. Sketch for the Mural Wheels New York (Lot 1183) is the sketch for the oil painting Wheels: Industrial New York, which was exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Unlike many other artists who favored subjects such as nature, literati landscapes and the universe, such imagery proved of little interest for this artist. As he gave voice to the spirit of the times and the desire of Chinese artists to be a part of the booming progress of art, Yun Gee showed that expressing a Chinese outlook and the unique aesthetic charm of his culture would hardly limit him to paintings of traditional landscapes, but instead could also be used to express ideas about and concern for modern society. But the preconceptions that others had about Chinese art was difficult to escape, and Yun Gee was sometimes asked, "Why don't you paint landscapes or bird-and-flower paintings like the other artists?" But Yun Gee understood that the energy for artistic development is drawn from observing one's own life and experiences, because, as he said, he was "living in a modern industrial society, not sitting on a mountaintop meditating on nature." Sketch for the Mural Wheels New York reflects the outlook and ideas of the era, and witness to its changes and transformations.