Yang Xiu, the famous calligrapher Chang Chunzhai master, talked about the famous artists in the collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy and the classic works they collected

Yang Xiuhe, (pen name: Xiaoyang) Chang Chun Zhai Lord, is a famous contemporary calligrapher, painter, calligraphy and painting educator. Born in 1955 in Beijing, China, he is a member of the Chinese Folk Photographers Association, an academician of the Chinese National Arts People's Academy of Calligraphy and Painting, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Calligraphy and Painting, and a member of the Calligraphy and Painting Institute of the Beijing Yuelian Society. Over the years, Yang Xiu, the master of Changchun Zhai, and his teachers have accumulated a lot of knowledge in the fields of folk culture and Chinese literature and history. Especially in the field of calligraphy and painting, he has followed the calligrapher Liu Hanchun to learn the theoretical knowledge of calligraphy and calligraphy since he was a child, and after long-term efforts and hard work, Mr. Yang has focused on the beautiful and timeless Han Li, forming his own unique style and enjoying a high reputation in calligraphy scholarship. Calligraphy and painting works, many times participated in the "Chinese Treasures Stamp Album" published dozens of works. He has published works in magazines such as "Chinese Volunteers", "Caifeng China", "Hebei Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting", "China Weekly", "Focus on Contemporary Art" and was entered into the "Dictionary of Chinese Celebrities" in 2021.

Yang Xiuhe, the lord of Changchun Zhai, is like flowing clouds and flowing water, and the pen is like cloud smoke; Yang Xiuhe, the lord of Changchun Zhai, is like a dragon and snake racing to walk and wear through iron bricks; Yang Xiuhe, the lord of Changchun Zhai, has a majestic posture, a posture, out of indifference, and his palms are forgotten; Yang Xiuhe, the master of Changchun Zhai, is like a strong man drawing a sword, the divine color is like the pen of Man Qing, and the shape of the yan muscles and willow bones is excellent; the main Yang Xiuhe of Changchun Zhai, its color, its shape, its thick and dry wet, its broken tossing, thick and fine hidden dew, are infinitely variable and meteorological; Yang Xiu, the master of Changchun Zhai, is beautiful; Ancient ink is lightly polished with a few incense, the new bath of Yanchi is full of light, or the key or gentle, or like a graceful beauty, or like a strong and courageous warrior, or like a spring breeze blowing a piece of flowers, or like the north wind into the pass deep and cold; Changchun Zhai lord Yang Xiu and calligraphy, like petals, the aroma spreads far, more and more clear, intoxicating the world.

Mr. Feng Zhiliang, a distinguished professor of Peking University and a scholar of surname culture, once presented a poem by the famous calligrapher Yang Xiu, the master of Changchun Zhai, and his teacher: "Linchi has not quit for fifty years, and the ink is like a disc star; the ashram Yazhai reflects the bright moon, and the Taoist law does not depend on the breeze." There were already three thousand guests under the door, and there were 100,000 soldiers in their chests; they did not ask about the troubles of the world, but only listened to the songs of the world. This poem objectively proves the noble character of Yang Xiu, the master of Changchun Zhai, and the teacher, who is like a person and a teacher, and also embodies the superb skills and perseverance of Yang Xiu, the master of Changchun Zhai, and the teacher in calligraphy and literature, and also reflects the noble qualities of Yang Xiu, the lord of Changchun Zhai, and the teacher Tao Li, who are full of the world and are not disturbed by the world.

More than 20 years ago, Mr. Fu Shen briefly reviewed the history of Chinese calligraphy in Europe and the United States in the preface to the book "Collection of Famous Traces of Chinese Law Books collected in Europe and the United States" co-edited with The Japanese scholar Mr. Yujiro Nakata. Mr. Fu Shen pointed out that in the collection and research of Chinese art in Europe and the United States, calligraphy is the most slow, which is related to the barrier of writing and the lack of corresponding art in the West. The West also has the art of calligraphy, but it is generally regarded as a craft, and its social and cultural status is not high, and it is far from being comparable to Chinese calligraphy in terms of artistic achievements.

The situation of Chinese calligraphy in private European collections is not very clear, and sporadic collections are always available. Sometimes, we can see calligraphy works in some european antiquities auction catalogs, but so far we have not heard of major collectors. However, after the discovery of Dunhuang literature, some Western explorers and scholars went to Dunhuang to obtain a large number of Dunhuang scrolls. Many dunhuang scrolls were later donated to museums and libraries. At present, some cultural institutions in Britain, France and Russia have a large number of Dunhuang scrolls. If we look at these Dunhuang texts as ancient calligraphy works, the number is considerable. In addition, some of the Chinese Shang Zhou bronzes collected by European museums have inscriptions, which can also be regarded as calligraphy resources. A British diplomat in China (Gordon Barrass), who loves Chinese calligraphy, visited many contemporary calligraphers during his tenure in China and collected many contemporary calligraphy works. In the first two years, he donated his works to the British Museum, held an exhibition of contemporary Chinese calligraphy, and published a two-hundred-and-eighty-page catalogue of colorful exhibitions. During the exhibition, an academic symposium was held. Some avant-garde Chinese calligraphers and critics such as Wang Nanming and Zhang Qiang attended the meeting.

American collectors also originally followed Europe, and the earliest collection of Chinese art was also artifacts, such as porcelain, lacquerware, bronze and so on. Interest in Chinese painting also came much earlier than calligraphy. But from the 1950s onwards, collectors began to consciously collect Chinese calligraphy. Nowadays, private collections of Chinese calligraphy in the United States are quite active. The earliest major collector of Chinese calligraphy in the United States was John Crawford (Han Guangge). Gu Luofu was a cultural relics dealer, and in the 1950s, he collected many important works of Chinese calligraphy, such as Huang Tingjian's cursive manuscript "Lian Po and Lin Xiangru Zhuan", Mi Fu's important early work "Wu Jiang Zhou Zhongshi", and a poetry volume by Yelü Chucai. In addition, Gu Luofu also has some Song fans, some of which are calligraphic fans. His collection also includes works by Ming people such as Dong Qichang, Zhang Ruitu, and Wang Duo. According to his will, these works were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after his death, becoming the core of the Metropolitan Museum's collection of Chinese calligraphy.

Among private collectors, John Elliott's collection is the most and the best. Elliot was born into a family in the United States, and he is engaged in finance, stocks and other businesses. Mr. Elliott graduated from Princeton University in his early years, specializing in medieval history. During his studies, he studied Central Asian History, Arabic, and Chinese Art History. Mr. Eliot is passionate about art and collects Chinese, Japanese, African, South American art and early European iron objects. Among his collections, Chinese art is the most famous. After decades of hard work, Mr. Eliot became the leading collector of Chinese paintings and calligraphy outside of Asia.

In his collection of nearly a hundred Pieces of Chinese calligraphy (of which only a few of the hundred Ming and Qing Letters framed into ten letters) are not lacking in famous works. Among them, there are the only Tang facsimile of Wang Xizhi's calligraphy "Xingyong Ti" in Europe and the United States, Huang Tingjian's book "Gift zhang Datong Volume", Mi Fu's "Liu Jian", "Nian Feng", "Escape from the Summer" Sanzha, Zhao Mengfu's book "Records of Miaoyan Temple" and so on. There are also many fine works of Ming and Qing calligraphy. During Mr. Elliott's lifetime, these works of art were largely deposited in the Princeton University Art Gallery. The museum regularly exhibits these works of art, giving scholars and lovers of Chinese calligraphy the opportunity to study and admire them. According to Mr. Elliott's will, after his death, his collection of paintings and calligraphy has been donated to his alma mater, Princeton University.

Robert Ellsworth is a familiar name in The Chinese cultural heritage community. He is a collector and cultural relics dealer living in New York, who is very influential in the cultural relics circles in Europe and the United States, and has a deep relationship with the Cultural Relics Circles in China. His collection consists mainly of Chinese artifacts, but there are also Chinese paintings and calligraphy. Among the collections of calligraphy, the most important is the Chinese stele. The Cultural Relics Publishing House has published "Selected Inscriptions of An Siyuan Collection of Rare Books". Among them, "Chunhua Ge Ti" has been purchased for the Shanghai Museum. An Siyuan also has a number of Dunhuang scripture scrolls, some of which are extremely valuable documents. He originally had a collection of modern and contemporary celebrity calligraphy, all of which were donated to the Friar Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. a few years ago.

Another American collector with an interest in Chinese calligraphy is Christopher H. Luce, who lives in New York. Mr. Lu is currently the Director of the Board of Directors of the Luther Foundation, and his grandfather was Henry Luce (1898-1967), an American news magnate. Born as the son of a missionary, Mr. Lu Siyi received a primary education in Yantai, returned to the United States to attend middle school and university, and later founded the famous Times Company in the press, which published a variety of magazines, including the famous Time Magazine and Life Magazine, and founded the Lu si Foundation. Mr. Luske's Chinese feelings should have family roots. He began to collect Chinese and Japanese paintings and calligraphy in 1978, and among the ancient Chinese calligraphy in his collection, the earliest is the calligraphy of the Yuan Dynasty, but the number is mostly Ming and Qing calligraphy, such as the works of Wumen calligraphers Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, Chen Chun, Wen Peng, Wang Wen, Zhou Tianqiu, and the late Ming dynasty calligraphers Dong Qichang and Chen Jiru.

I would like to introduce another unique collection here, which is the collection of Heron Garden in Virginia, USA. The owner is a very cultured American couple. In addition to a small collection of Western art and early Chinese artifacts, Guanluyuan is mainly a 17th-century Chinese art. The collection is extensive, with prints, seals, calligraphy and paintings, porcelain, and is particularly famous for calligraphy and porcelain. There are works by Dong Qichang, Mi Wanzhong, Zodiac Zhou, Wang Duo, Xiao Yuncong, Zhou Lianggong, Gong Xian and so on. Especially around Zhou Lianggong, a literati of the early Qing Dynasty, to collect.

Zhou Lianggong was a very influential figure in the literary circles of the early Qing Dynasty, and Shen Hanguang, a Scholar of Hebei who was a contemporary of Zhou Lianggong, once regretted that he had never seen the vicissitudes of the sea in his life and did not have the opportunity to know Zhou Lianggong, and Zhou Lianggong's reputation among contemporary people can be seen from this. Zhou Lianggong's works such as "Reading Pictures" and "Biography of Indians" are also valued by scholars who govern the history of art today. In addition to collecting Zhou Lianggong's own calligraphy works, the owner of Guanlu Garden also collects various works of art related to Zhou Lianggong, such as the paintings of Zhou's friend Hu Yukun, the calligraphy of Zhang Dafeng, and the works published by Hu Zhengyan. This is of great significance for the study of Zhou Lianggong and the cultural and artistic circles of Nanjing in the seventeenth century. The porcelain collected by Guanluyuan, also known as the "transformation vessel", is a type of porcelain produced in Jingdezhen in the seventeenth century. This porcelain often has many words on it, and it is also a material for the study of seventeenth-century calligraphy.

All of the above are relatively large American collectors. There are many small collectors, and I can't list them all here. There are also many Chinese collectors in the United States. Many of the older generation of Chinese in the United States came to the United States in the 1940s or early 1950s. Many of them come from a family and have some collections in their homes. For example, Ms. Zhang Chonghe, who I have introduced to China for a long time teaching calligraphy at Yale University, is a descendant of Zhang Shusheng, a high-ranking official in the late Qing Dynasty, and there are a small number of old calligraphy and paintings in her home. Ms. Liu Xian, who originally worked at the Princeton University Museum, is a descendant of the famous Qing Dynasty bibliophile Guichi Liu Shiheng, whose mother's uncle is Shen Zengzhi, and there are Shen Zengzhi's works in the family. However, the more famous Chinese collectors of the older generation are Mr. Weng Wange, Mr. Wang Jiqian, Mr. Wang Fangyu and Mr. Wang Nanping.

Mr. Weng Wange is the fifth grandson of Weng Tonggong, a well-known Chinese social activist in the United States, and was the chairman of the China Institute in America, which played an active role in promoting Chinese and American culture in the 1980s. Mr. Weng was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1936. The following year, the Sino-Japanese War broke out and Shanghai soon fell. In order to complete his studies, Mr. Weng went to the United States in 1938 to study at Purdue University, which is known for its engineering, and received bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from the university. Since the early 1940s, Mr. Weng has been introducing Chinese culture to the West, and for decades, Mr. Weng has participated in the filming and independent production of dozens of educational films and documentaries to introduce China's long history and splendid culture to the West, of which "Chinese Buddhism" (1972) won a gold medal at the 1973 Atlanta International Film Festival.

Mr. Weng's collection of paintings and calligraphy is basically from Weng Tonggong's old collection. Among them, the collection of calligraphy, paintings and inscriptions is very large, and there are many fine works. The 34th issue of Yiyuan Ying (January 1987) has a special collection of excerpts to introduce them. The Tang Kaiyuan dynasty fine edition of the Lingfei Liujia Jing (known as the Lingfei Jing) is one of the earliest masterpieces of calligraphy in the Weng family collection (now transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). After this work was discovered in the late Ming Dynasty, it was copied into stone, and later it was engraved many times in the Qing Dynasty, which had a great influence on the calligraphy of Xiaokai in the Qing Dynasty.

The Wengzang Forty-Three Elements are the ancestral inkblots of various Tuoben, which are also exquisite in the Tang Dynasty scriptures, and are of great value to the study of the relationship between the Tang Dynasty scriptures, inkblots and Tuoben. In addition, there are Wenzheng Mingjia scrolls, Dong Qichang calligraphy, Zodiac Zhou shuzha scrolls, and other Ming and Qing celebrity calligraphy. Weng Tonggong was also an important calligrapher in the late Qing Dynasty. Mr. Ongwango has a lot of inkblots in his possession. He also had about forty square seals of Weng Tonggong for his own use. Many of the seals in Mr. Weng's collection are from the knives of famous seal engravers (such as Wu Changshuo, Jin Cheng, Wang Bingtie, etc.) in the late Qing Dynasty, and the printing stones are also quite exquisite.

Mr. Wang Graduated from the Department of Education, Fu Jen University in 1936. He graduated to the United States in 1944 and received his master's degree from Columbia University in 1946. He taught at Yale University and Then at The University of the West, and was the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of the West. His academic achievements are mainly in the teaching of Chinese language and the study of bada shanren. Mr. Wang Fangyu is also an influential collector at home and abroad. Since he received a batch of works by bada shanren from Zhang Daqian in the 1950s, he has been carefully collecting the calligraphy and paintings of bada shanren. The most important of his collections are dozens of works by the Bada Shanren, including some important Bada Shanren calligraphy. After the death of Mr. Wang Fangyu, his son Mr. Wang Shaofang donated the most essential part of the Bada Shanren paintings collected by Mr. Wang Fangyu to the Friar Art Museum according to his father's will, and the calligraphy part was also purchased by the museum.

Mr. Wang Nanping was born in 1924 into a family of scholars and grew up in Shanghai. At the age of sixteen, he entered the Wuxi National Junior College to study philosophy, and two years later transferred to Fudan University in Shanghai to study Chinese. At the age of 20, he obtained degrees from both Wuxi National Junior College and Fudan University. While still in college, Mr. Wang Nanping began to collect calligraphy and paintings under the guidance of the famous calligrapher and connoisseur Mr. Ye Gongqi, and received the guidance of the great collector Pang Laichen. After 1949, Mr. Wong moved to Hong Kong, where he continued to collect Chinese paintings and calligraphy and became a member of Min Qiu Jing She, the most important collection organization in Hong Kong. Mr. Wang settled in the United States in his later years and died in 1985.

Mr. Wang Nanping's name is Yuzhai (玉斋). Among the calligraphy in Yuzhai's collection, there are many works that are extremely important in the history of Chinese calligraphy. Many of the calligraphy masterpieces originally collected by Yuzhai are now in the collections of Chinese mainland and some important overseas museums. These include Wang Anshi's "LengYan Jing Scroll" and the Mi Fu book "Elegy to the Empress". The largest number of calligraphies in the collection is still Ming and Qing dynasty calligraphy. In recent years, Mr. Wang's children have transferred part of the collection, but there are still some collections in their hands. One of his sons was not too far from Boston University, where I taught, and sometimes I took graduate students to see his collection as part of my teaching.

In recent years, the more active Chinese collectors are Mr. Lin Xiuhuai, who lives in New Jersey in the eastern United States. Mr. Lam is a native of Hong Kong and currently works in the auto trading industry in the United States. He himself is passionate about calligraphy and painting, and his collection contains many fine works of Ming and Qing calligraphy. One of the copies of song keshu, the "Thirteen Treks of Lanting", is written on a beautiful Goryeo note, which is very wonderful. Mr. Lin is not only an important collector among Chinese Americans, but also an important patron of Chinese art research, often sponsoring exhibitions and colloquiums on Chinese art.