iberkshires, July, 25 2005
Masterworks of Chinese painting at the Williams College Museum of Art

Williamstown - Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds, a stunning panorama of distinguished Chinese paintings from the Ching Yüan Chai Collection, which represents virtually every period of Chinese painting over the last 900 years.

The exhibition features seventy-five hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, and album leaves from the collection of Sung, Yüan, Ming, and Ch’ing dynasties, amassed over nearly fifty years by preeminent scholar of Chinese art James Cahill.

Along with major figure paintings and a selection of botanical and animal subjects, the exhibition features a number of exceptional landscape paintings. Considered the highest category of painting in China, landscape painting embodies the ideals of the Confucian scholar and has inspired Chinese painting’s most daring experiments and greatest developments. The landscape paintings featured in the exhibition display remarkable depth and focus, revealing an intimately observed living universe.

Among the paintings in Masterworks are a delicate early-thirteenth-century hanging scroll by the court painter Ma Yüan depicting a quiet detail of mountain scenery. This image contrasts with the innovative Ming figure painter Ch’en Hung-shou’s bold mid-seventeenth-century hanging scroll, which reinterprets a poignant encounter in Chinese history. The exhibition also features a monumental fifteenth-century landscape by Tai Chin, a major painting by the sixteenth-century Wu School painter Wen Cheng-Ming, and several works by Kung Hsien, the foremost of the Individualist painters based in seventeenth-century Nanjing.

Professor Cahill began collecting Chinese paintings in 1955 while on a Fulbright fellowship in Japan, where he was completing his dissertation on fourteenth-century (Yüan) painting. While there, a Japanese scholar bestowed the name “Ching Yüan Chai,” a name which roughly translates as “Studio of One Who Is Looking Intently at the Yüan Dynasty.” Professor Cahill has likened his pursuit of Chinese paintings to the eleventh-century poet Su Tung-p’o’s allusion to mists and clouds that pass before one’s eyes but whose pleasures long endure. In his teaching, Professor Cahill used the Ching Yüan Chai collection as a primary resource; he has often said that the paintings themselves are the best teachers.

This exhibition was organized and circulated by the Berkeley Art Museum and guest curated by Julia M. White, curator of Asian Art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The exhibition is made possible by Dorothy Dunlap Cahill, Hsingyuan Tsao and James Cahill, Nicholas Cahill, and Sarah Cahill, and by an anonymous donor. Major support is provided by United Commercial Bank, the Shenson Foundation, and Jane R. Lurie.

Related Events

Scarlett Jang, Williams College Associate Professor of Art and a former student of James Cahill, will present a noon-time lecture Thursday October 13 from 12:10 to 12.50 pm.

James Cahill, creator of the Ching Yüan Chai collection, will give two lectures. On Wednesday, November 16, he will deliver “Adventures of a Scholar-Teacher Collecting Chinese Paintings,” concerning both how it was possible to acquire good Chinese paintings on a professor’s salary and how Professor Cahill used his collecting as a tool in teaching. This lecture will be followed by a reception. On Thursday, November 17, Professor Cahill will present “Passages of Felt Life: Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?” In this lecture, Professor Cahill will argue that certain Chinese paintings from the 17th-18th century were designed for an audience of women, and will distinguish this mode of collecting with the collecting of male connoisseurs. Both lectures will be presented at 4:00 pm at WCMA.

All events are free and open to the public. Please check our website for additional events as they are confirmed at http://www.wcma.org/.

http://www.iberkshires.com/story.php?story_id=17829

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nyt, July 22, 2005
ART REVIEW; Looking Into the Divine Eyes of Spiritual Sculptures
By HOLLAND COTTER

The opening of the eyes is one of the very last steps in the making of a Hindu religious sculpture. A priest will ritually scrape the eye with a golden needle, or add an extra flick of paint, and a figure cast in bronze or carved in stone, a work of ''fine art'' in our dry vocabulary, becomes something else: a divinity who returns our gaze.

Dozens of pairs of eyes look out from ''Images of the Divine: South and Southeast Asian Sculpture From the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection'' at the Asia Society. The 50 sculptures come from what is considered to be one of the finest small gatherings of such material in the United States. They are also, individually and in concert, thrilling examples of spiritually activist art, which is what all great religious art is.

They were not made primarily to entertain or give optical pleasure, although they do both. Their job was to wake you up, point you in a moral direction, make you look at the greed, hatred and delusions that sit like sharp rocks in the soul. Once you see the truth about yourself, the idea is, you can change yourself. And when you change yourself, you change the world. That's the karmic deal.

Some sort of a desire to make a difference in the world motivated John D. Rockefeller 3rd to found the Asia Society in 1956 and, for nearly a quarter of a century, to give the institution nearly 300 Asian objects -- Indian sculptures, Chinese porcelains, Japanese paintings -- that he and his wife had assembled. Over the years, exhibitions of portions of the collection alternated with other, temporary shows at Asia Society's Park Avenue headquarters. But only since an expansion of exhibition space in 2001 have large chunks of Rockefeller material been visible on a more or less continuous, rotating basis. ''Images of the Divine,'' representing about half the Indian and Southeast Asia holdings, is the latest of these presentations.

Organized by Adriana Proser, the curator of traditional Asian art at the Asia Society, the work is divided by religion, with one section devoted to Hindu sculpture and two to Buddhist. The combined geographical reach of the groupings stretches from Tibet to Java; the stylistic and intellectual scope is tremendous; the points of overlap and interaction many and subtle.

Ms. Proser would be the first to acknowledge that the breakdown is artificial in real-world terms. Hinduism isn't one religion but many religions, with deities beyond counting. Most exist only on a local, even household, level and in abstract and ephemeral forms. A few are widely acknowledged and have a codified visual presence.

One of the Rockefeller collection's strengths is its concentration of bronze temple sculptures made during the Chola dynasty (880-1279 A.D.) in South India. These free-standing figures of gods and goddesses were designed to appear in processions. Dressed in sumptuous robes, they were carried through the temple grounds or into the street, where their devotees could see them and, at least as important, where they could see their worshipers and bestow blessings.

One glance at these objects leaves you puzzling, yet again, over why the art of ancient India isn't more popular in the West. Never mind its formal perfection and intellectual complexity. Everything we love in Hollywood movies is here: sex, violence, heroism, humor, not to mention family values and religion.

The one figure who seems to have broken the barrier is the elephant-headed god Ganesha. And he's in top form in an 11th-century Chola piece here, swaying on pudgy legs, as if about to dance, brandishing a different object in each of his four hands: a broken tusk, a plump sweet, a ritual club and a noose.

His image embodies a basic paradox of much Indian religious art: it is at once highly naturalistic and utterly fantastic. Multiple limbs may look freakish, but they are entirely logical. How better to depict the multi-tasking potency of a divine being, one who can eat, meet-and-greet, wield a lasso and do a little jig at the same time?

Ganesha is a doll and a charmer. Actually, there's much more to him, but that's already a lot. To love him, you don't need to know that with his lasso he rounds up devotees like stray lambs and sets their hearts free. Nor do you need to know that he sits at the threshold of time and space, a cosmic guardian, just as he sits at the doors of temples, shops and homes, overseeing and easing all beginnings: birth, marriage, the start of a journey, the first played notes of a raga and the moment of death -- when a spirit either enters another cycle of existence or achieves a state of fear-free rest.

That state of rest is a goal of Buddhism, a religion that shares many elements with Hinduism but is focused on the life of a single man, a young Indian aristocrat named Gautama, born in the fifth century B.C. He married, had a child, lived well. But in his late 20's he underwent a spiritual trauma, a complete revolution of vision. He suddenly saw with shattering clarity a reality that most people suppress: the fact that mortal life is not a growth process, but a death process.

Ardently desirous of finding some relief from the despair that this knowledge brought, he took radical action. He completely changed his life. He left home, became a wanderer and a searcher and found his answer: stop the desiring, even for relief, even for answers; peace will follow.

Peace is often the implicit subject of early Buddhist art in India, which is one reason Western audiences have always taken to it. There is also the comfort of a certain familiarity, through traces of influence from Greco-Roman art. They are unmistakable in a stone head of the Buddha carved in the second or third century A.D. in what is now Pakistan, where currents of Indian, Central Asian and Hellenistic cultures flowed together.

Their mingling was further refined in India itself from the fourth through sixth centuries during the Gupta dynasty, a period that was once routinely called India's golden age. The Rockefellers acquired several superb Gupta pieces. Three bronze sculptures of the earthly Buddha are the rarest, but a high-relief carving of the same type of figure in beige sandstone is the best known.

Like so much Indian art, it is an image of becoming, rather than being, an attempt to capture in concrete form the dynamic of change. The Buddha's youthful, verging-on-androgynous body seems to be melting through his monk's robe. His figure, idealized and bizarre, is based on elements from the natural world: his eyes are like lotus petals, his legs and arms like saplings that seem to be growing as we look.

The Gupta style was endlessly influential. It spread from place to place, era to era, through India, upward into the Himalayas, downward and outward to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and the Indonesian archipelago, merging with indigenous traditions all along the way.

Its dispersion coincided with, and no doubt helped to shape, changes in Buddhism itself, which was expanding from a monastic discipline to a popular religion. In doing so, it accumulated an elaborate pantheon of deities, many Hindu in origin. And it introduced a new order of sacred beings called bodhisattvas, Buddhas-in-the-making who volunteered their services to help earthly creatures achieve salvation.

A marvelous small copper image from Western Tibet of the most revered bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara, joined the Rockefeller collection in 1994. Both John D. and Blanchette Rockefeller had died by then, but they surely would have fallen for his confident, no-nonsense smile and appreciated the prettily embroidered meditation strap looped around his knee, which ensured that he would keep a yogi's poise even if he nodded off.

The Rockefellers clearly did fall for an amazingly complex eighth-century image of the crowned Buddha from Kashmir or northern Pakistan, in which Gupta suavity yields to exotic non-Indian styles. But the truly distinctive component of the Buddhist material is its Southeast Asian art.

Treasures abound. I'll mention just two, one because it is easy to overlook, the other because it is one of the greatest sculptures in New York. The first, only about six inches tall, is a seated bronze figure, possibly from Sumatra, of a bodacious Buddhist goddess who has the sweetest face, the tiniest waist and the most arms (eight) in the show.

The other, more than three feet tall, is a bronze standing figure of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, probably made in Thailand in the eighth century. Dressed in what looks like a miniskirt or a bathing suit, he has a matinee-idol allure. But he also seems oddly abstracted, as if he were listening to distant music and following its rhythms, air-guitar-style, with the delicate fingers of his four raised hands.

Maitreya is the Buddha of the future, the savior of the earthly age that will succeed the present one. Standard Hindu and Buddhist accounts consider the present age, with its belief in the virtue of greed and its blind faith in power through intimidation, a disaster, corrupt beyond redemption. What religious art offers, through countless acts of passive resistance, is a response in the form of alternatives.

Avalokiteshvara, his hand extended palm upward toward us, says: ''Take what you need. What's mine is yours.'' Ganesha, ever busy but always ready to boogie, says: ''Approach without fear. Let's start a conversation.'' Maitreya may seem a little removed from the scene, but his downcast dark eyes, inlaid with silver and black stone, tell another story, eloquently. They are downcast but wide open; they miss nothing and remember everything. And they are focused on the future.

''Images of the Divine'' continues at the Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212)288-6400, through Sept. 18.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E3DC173FF931A15754C0A9639C8B63

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Taipei Times, Jul 14, 2005
New-age Taiwanese curators show off themselves and their artists
A few exhibitions running in Taipei present though-provoking works of art that break away from the norm
By Susan Kendzulak
[image] ?

The position of curator is a burgeoning field in Taiwan and is not as well-established as in Europe. Besides selecting the artist and the artwork, the curator has to raise funds and act as a mediator between the exhibition space and the artist. In the past, it was art history majors that often worked as curators and who often treated the artworks like museum artifacts for a usually uninspiring show.

Today's curators come up with interesting ideas like creating a dialogue between provocative artists and the interested audience. We can see the results of some young curators' works as there are two stimulating shows on view now in Taiwan.

The first show is curated by Sean Hu, one of the founders of Unison 8 that recently organized the 25 Years of Ars Electronica art at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung. He helped arrange a mini-retrospective of the Buddhist-inspired video works by performance/multimedia artist Chen Yung-hsien (陳永賢) titled The Song of Body, currently on view at the Hong-gah Museum.

In the video Release Flesh, the artist's head is covered with bacon attached by elastic bands. As scissors snip away at the bands, the slabs of bacon fall away with the fleshy meat symbolizing that lower-level desire must be removed in order to attain a higher plain of awareness. As we live having to digest and retain information instantly and regurgitate it just as fast, this exhibition is refreshing in that, paradoxically, these time-based videos force you to slow down, to sit and watch the events unfold slowly. The video works are hypnotic and you will feel refreshed and rejuvenated to have given them the time they deserve. This is an exhibition well worth seeing.

The other exhibition requires the city's fast pace. Sandy Hsiu-chih Lo (羅秀芝) is the curator for Border Crossing: The Shadow Dance of Cities, which is a group show of foreign and local artists. The diverse works she brings together touch on topics popular among local curators: belonging/alienation, insider/outsider and domestic/exotic.

Often, art exhibitions that include Western artists will display art that exoticizes Asia, the equivalent of the aesthetic of "East meets West."

So, images of temples, architectural details of Chinese-style buildings, smiling school girls running in uniform or installations made with paper money and incense are what many Wes-tern artists typically produce.

For Border Crossing the foreign artists are as much a part of the society they live in rather than being outsiders and as a result give hypothetical solutions to living in the rapidly urbanizing environments of Asia. It may even be hard to discern the Western artists from the Eastern ones, and that is how it should be. Art should be judged on its own and not by the national identity of its maker. Artists include multimedia artists Lin Pey-chwen (林珮淳), Peng Anne-Anne (彭安安), Lindsay Cox, photographer Daniel Traub, and social commentators Lin Hong John (林宏璋), Ella Raidel, the group Channel A, and myself.

And also this summer several Taiwanese artists will participate in a group show at the Helsinki City Art Museum, in Finland, titled A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography. It includes the work of 42 artists from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and is organized by the Hong Kong-based Hanart Gallery. Eight well-known artists from Taiwan are included. Unfortunately none of the Taiwanese artists are women, a gross misrepresentation of Taiwan's contemporary art scene abroad.

Exhibition details:
☆Chen Yung-hsien, 'The Song of Body,' at Hong-Gah Museum, 5F, 260, Tai-Ye Road, Taipei, Taiwan, (台北市北投區大業路260號5樓).

☆Border Crossing, `The Shadow Dance of Cities,' at Tainan National University of the Arts, 66 Tachi, Kuantien, 720 Tainan, Taiwan (台南縣官 田鄉大崎村 66 號), call (06) 693 0100~3.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/07/14/2003263502

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with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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