Capital Times Life Article from July 4th 2007

FINE CHINA COLLECTION

CHAZEN SHOW HIGHLIGHTS FAMILY'S GIFT

By Jacob Stockinger The Capital Times

When it comes to collecting Chinese art, the University of Wisconsin's Chazen Museum of Art is about to take a great leap forward.

Thanks to the generosity of UW-Madison alumni Simon and Rosemary Chen and their children, the museum has acquired the first installment of 20th century Chinese art in what promises to be the beginning of an important new collection.

Although modern and contemporary Chinese politics and economics are among the hottest topics in current affairs, Western art museums have typically lagged behind.

"People are finally coming around and starting to pay attention to the Chinese art in the 20th century," says UW Chinese art professor Julia Murray. She notes that much older, more traditional works have been the focus of most museum collections. "But in the past decade or so, modern and contemporary Chinese art has become hot."

Murray should know. She curated the show "The Hall of Self-Reliance," which opens Saturday in the Chazen's Mayer Gallery and features about 30 of the 100 works the Chen family has so far donated. She also wrote the wall labels and brochure for the exhibit.

The Chen donation pleases Chazen director Russell Panczenko.

"We had no example of trends in Chinese art in the 20th century, and now we have nice grouping," Panczenko says, adding that the Chazen's new addition, set to open in early 2011, will have a bigger and more diverse gallery devoted to Asian art. "Most of what we have now is Southeast Asian art, so this will expand it to the public. Contemporary Chinese art is exploding as the country opens up. Chinese artists are traveling abroad and at home are being allowed to show their work to their peers. It's a period of tremendous ferment.

"I'm sure Chinese art is going to have a major impact on the art world in general," Panczenko adds. "As developing countries become more affluent, they can deal with culture and identity and not just survival. And they fall outside the Western canon. So much of our attention is focused on modernism in Europe and North America, and now you have this contemporary art exploding that has nothing to do with that at all. Many critics don't know how to react to it. It doesn't fit into their set of concepts."

* * *

Back to the future: The art may be modern, but don't look for either Maoist propaganda or Chinese proverbs about capitalism.

That's because a lot of contemporary Chinese art looks backward to older forms, especially to calligraphy, Murray explains. It has to do with the Chinese notion of what an educated person was, much like the Western idea of the well-rounded "Renaissance man," only many centuries earlier as part of the Confucian tradition that said arts were a form of relaxation and not a main occupation.

"The amateur ideal took definitive shape in the 11th century in China," Murray explains. "It meant that a well-rounded gentleman or a government official can express himself in an artistic way. There was also the idea that if you're an educated person, you have already trained your hand by learning to write and you don't need more manual training to create the symbolic language of art. This is not outsider art at all, this is the establishment creating art."

Collected over the years by the Chen family, which fled from mainland China and the Communists and went to Taiwan and then to the Midwest, the art explores the way modern times have revitalized older traditions.

"This is not just the stuff commanding high auction prices right now," Murray says.

Viewers will see the revival of traditional brush-and-ink painting and calligraphy, of oil paintings and rubbings. All the works are two-dimensional. The oldest dates from 1692, and the most recent date from the 1990s, with most of the collection coming into the 20th century, especially the period after the 1911 Nationalist revolution led by Sun Yat-sen against the emperor.

"The scholar official is also an amateur artist," Murray says, noting that much of the art has inscriptions by the makers to the collectors as a sign of the personal relationships that the art represented.

"There's also quite a bit of variety," says Murray, citing landscapes, figures and portraits, flowers and striking calligraphy in different formats.

"I think everyone should be able to find something that appeals to them, even without knowing what they're looking at," Murray says.

"The collection is very important," adds Murray, who says both her undergraduate and graduate students will use it.

"It is a good group of things that have a logical connection with each other," she says. "I can imagine using it with a lot of my courses to show art and also artistic aspects of social and political trends of China in the 20th century. People who don't innately have an interest in the arts will find it interesting that the movers and shakers of China in the 20th century also had an interest in art."

And, she predicts, the Chen collection will grow in relevance.

"China is only going to become more important," she adds. "China is certainly going to be a dominant form of culture and art in the 21st century. You just can't say American or European art forms are the norm and that the others are variations. Looked at from the Chinese point of view, we are the variation."

Panczenko agrees and thinks the collection is good for both the public and the museum.

"This art is something you can take at whatever level suits you," Panczenko says. "I feel like this is just the beginning. We can do more with this collection and might even attract others who think the Chazen will be a good home for their art."

THE DETAILS

What: A free public reception with refreshments and a cash bar. The Chens and their family will be present.

When: 6 p.m. Friday, July 13.

Where: Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.

Etc.: The show runs through Aug. 26. For information, call 263-2246.