Past editions artist

Samuel Porteous

On our stage at:

United Magicians for the World 2020

Samuel Porteous is an award winning author and illustrator based in Shanghai, with close to twenty years of living and working in China. He is Chief Creative Director of Drowsy Emperor, a design and content studio serving Chinese and Western audiences, and his work focuses on the special place China holds in the Western imagination. In an earlier career he was a corporate investigator and intelligence analyst, and his China analysis has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, among others.

For magic lovers he wrote "Ching Ling Foo: America's First Chinese Superstar", the biography of the original Chinese conjurer who conquered America, described as "remarkable" by Jim Steinmeyer. It tells how Foo, with his family of musicians and acrobats, overcame on stage attacks, deportation attempts and a diabolically clever American copycat to become, twice, the highest paid and most popular act in the United States, between 1898 and 1900 and again between 1912 and 1915.

He was our guest at United Magicians for the World, the online charity show of 2020.

This page is part of our historical archive: it tells the story of the PAST editions. The 2027 cast is revealed one name at a time on the Artists page.