Wah Chang
American designer (1917-2003)
Wah Ming Chang (August 2, 1917 – December 22, 2003) was an American sculptor, animator and artist. Chang is known for his contributions to the development of stop motion animation, as well as sculptures and the props he designed for Star Trek: The Original Series, including the tricorder and communicator.
Early life
Chang was born on August 2, 1917, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to artist Fai Sue Chang and her husband. The Chang family moved from Honolulu to San Francisco, California, and about 1920 opened the Ho-Ho Tea Room on Sutter Street, which became a favorite venue for the city's Bohemian artists. Fai Sue Chang was a graduate of Berkeley's California School of Arts and Crafts (today's California College of the Arts), where she specialized in fashion design and etching.
After she died in 1927, her husband persuaded Wah Ming Chang's art teacher and family friend James Blanding Sloan, and his wife Mildred Taylor, to become his son's legal guardians. Sloan exhibited Wah Ming's etchings and watercolors in public exhibitions as early as 1925 to favorable reviews in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in the largest art colony on the Pacific Coast, Carmel-by-the-Sea. The child became part of Sloan's family, traveled in 1926 to Taos, New Mexico, for the on-site study of American Indian culture, and in 1928 displayed his block prints in joint exhibitions with Sloan at the prestigious Philadelphia Print Club and in Pasadena, California.
Career
He became a valued assistant in several of Sloan's marionette theatres as well as in productions for the Hollywood Bowl Ballet and the "Cavalcade of Texas." In 1939, he was hired by Walt Disney Productions and became the youngest member of its Effects and Model Department, where he sculpted the maquette of Pinocchio which was used as reference for the film's animation, and articulated deer models for Bambi. After recovering from polio, Chang became acquainted with animator George Pal, working with him on his Puppetoons series of stop-motion animated films for Paramount Pictures and his live-action films such as The Time Machine (1960).
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7959690. VIAF identifies the subject as 43081382. The Library of Congress control number is n50036659. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 2003, 1920 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wah Chang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.