Based on a large amount of data, this paper discusses the sources of ancient Chinese art collection in the United States, starting from several key figures in the outflow of Chinese cultural relics, such as antique dealers, curators, and collectors.
In the Opium War of 1840, the British opened the door to Chinese trade with artillery fire. The Meiji Restoration, which began in Japan in 1868, enabled the Japanese to take the initiative to "break away from Asia and join Europe" and throw themselves into the arms of the West. Since then, there has been a wave of exploration to the Far East in the cultural field of Western developed countries. Not only did they have a craze for oriental culture (especially Chinese culture) in their own countries, but they also believed that the Silk Road that ran through Europe and Asia in ancient times contained huge treasures of ancient culture. Therefore, along the ancient Silk Road, Western explorers have set foot on the mysterious land of China, in the lonely, desolate, uninhabited desert, in the remaining ruins of Buddhist temples, in the grottoes between the cliffs that no one cares about, to explore the cultural treasures of ancient China. During the expedition to China, the British, French, Japanese, Russians, Germans, and Americans appeared on the stage of history one after another. [1] This was accompanied by the fact that China was defeated by Western powers by force again and again, and signed treaties that humiliated the country. Therefore, the beginning of the outflow of Chinese cultural relics is also equated with the loss of power and humiliation of the country.
The so-called feats of these Western explorers aroused great interest among foreign collectors and antique dealers. As a result, in the first half of the 20th century, a large number of foreign collectors and antique dealers went to China in search of ancient art, and Chinese antique dealers seized these business opportunities and not to be far behind. There are also countless local Chinese ruined aristocratic losers, desperate lawbreakers, and people from all walks of life who want to make huge profits. In order to satisfy the Westerners' love for Chinese art, millions of cultural works have been sent to foreign museums and private collections. The American Museum's collection of Chinese art is a product of this larger historical context.
Today, more than 100 years later, many museums in the United States now hold countless ancient Chinese artifacts. Whether it is a Chinese living in the United States or a Chinese visiting the United States, after seeing the ancient Chinese cultural relics displayed in the American museum, their first reaction is that this must have been stolen from China by the United States when it joined the Eight-Nation Alliance. When I gave a lecture at some universities in China, the students answered this question in the same way. Since I came to the United States in 1999, I have worked in six large and small museums, and I am well aware of the main sources of Chinese cultural relics collected in the United States. The process of selling ancient Chinese art abroad and entering a public or private collection generally requires the efforts of three people: the seller or acquirer of Chinese antiquities, the antique dealer in the Chinese and Western antique market, the Western collector or the curator in the museum.
The seller of Chinese antiquities can be the heir of a family heirloom collection, who has to sell the heirloom collection in order to earn living expenses in the middle of the family's path. There is also a category of cultural relics that are sold by the inheritors of family heirlooms, and the author calls them the acquirers of cultural relics, that is, people who deliberately search for antiques in order to make a profit in the antique market, and then sell them to antique dealers after obtaining them. The recipients of these cultural relics can be second-hand dealers of cultural relics who walk the streets and alleys, or they can also be tomb robbers who take the initiative to steal cultural relics from historical sites. Antique dealers are the intermediary link in this cultural distribution channel: they buy the artefacts, and they sell them to make the difference. In contemporary times, auction houses also serve as a bridge between sellers and buyers. And the buyers of cultural relics in the West are the last link in this field of circulation. The vast majority of buyers of artifacts are private collectors, who buy artifacts for their love and interest in ancient art and keep them in their own homes to enjoy. But as they grew old or died, a significant number of them donated their collections to museums, or built their own museums to exhibit their life's work to the public. Curators are buyers of artefacts on behalf of the museum, who can purchase artworks for the museum directly from sellers, antique dealers, auction houses or private collectors with the support of a fund, and collect and display them in the museum. These three distribution channels are the main sources of art collections in museums large and small in the United States.
This article intends to start with the key figures in these three channels of exodus and discuss the sources of ancient Chinese art collections in the United States.
1. Antique dealers active in China and the United States
Among the countless large and small antique dealers, the Lu Wu Company and the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce are the two major antique dealers that played a key role in establishing the collections of Chinese art in major museums in the United States.
The founder of the company was Ching Tsai Loo (1880-1957). He was a well-known figure in the Western antiques scene who was active in the first half of the 20th century (Fig. 1). Lu Qinzhai was born in 1880 in Lujiadu, Huzhou, Zhejiang, and his ancestors were wealthy families who owned huge businesses for 16 consecutive generations. At the end of the 19th century, Lu Qinzhai was sent by his family to France in search of business opportunities. In 1902, at the Qing embassy in Paris, he met a young man, Zhang Jingjiang (1877-1950). A native of Huzhou, Zhejiang, Zhang Jingjiang was a close friend of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who served as provisional president of the Republic of China, and as chairman of the Standing Committee of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. At that time, Zhang Jingjiang was doing business work in the embassy. He suggested that Lu Qinzhai practice trade and open an antique shop, and Zhang expressed his willingness to participate in the assistance. So, Zhang Jingjiang's father invested 300,000 yuan, and Zhang Jingjiang cooperated with Lu Qinzhai to set up a Tongyun antique company in Paris, mainly engaged in tea, silk and antiques, and the business was prosperous. Later, it set up Laiyuan Company and opened branches in the United Kingdom, the United States and China. C.T. Loo is the English abbreviation of his company and Lu Qinzhai. During the First World War, Lo realized that the United States had become the center of the world's antiques market, so he and Wu Qizhou, a Shanghainese, opened the largest antique store in the United States, Lu Wu Company, on the corner of Madison and 57th Street in New York, specializing in the business of selling Chinese antiques to Americans (Pictures 2 and 3). At this time, Lu Qinzhai and the big dealers of antique shops in Beijing and Shanghai had formed a circle, similar to the current Chamber of Commerce. Lu Qinzhai was stationed in Paris, Uncle Yao, who was good at English, came to New York, Wu Qizhou in Shanghai, and Zhu Xuzhai in Beijing bought goods for them, shipped them to Shanghai, and then Wu Qizhou sent them to Paris or New York. It is one of the earliest, largest and longest-running Chinese cultural relics export companies. Fluent in English and French, Lu Qinzhai has acquired a large number of high-quality Chinese cultural relics with his skillful ability to identify Chinese cultural relics and a good business vision, which have gradually been recognized by European and American collectors. His fame and connections soon led him to become a supplier and consultant to many private museums, visiting his antiques shop for business tycoons or experts active in the world of antiquities and fine arts. Many of the Chinese antiques he was involved in buying and selling were priceless, including fine sculptures (including Buddhist statues), murals, bronzes, jades, and more. The Red House, built in the heart of Paris from 1926 to 1928, was the center of his collection of antiquities.
Fig. 1 ̉ Lu Qinzhai and his sculpture of Guanyin of the Water Moon
Fig. 2 'Lu Qinzhai in his art storeroom
Fig. 3 – Lu Qinzhai in his antique shop
In short, since 1915, the company has been exporting antiquities to the United States for 30 years, and countless national treasures have been shipped to the United States. The peak of Lu Qinzhai's antiques business coincided with the autumn of many disasters in China. The collapse of the Qing government caused the bankruptcy of a large number of Qing dynasty remnants, and the sons of former aristocratic families had to sell their ancestral treasures for their own lives. The melee of the Beiyang warlords and the invasion of the Japanese made the Nationalist Government ignore the historical relics. All these brought opportunities for Lu Qinzhai to purchase ancient and rare items at low prices, and then sell them to the European and American markets with a lot of profits. Lu Qinzhai gradually became a connoisseur of Chinese antiques and a well-known figure among the Chinese in Europe. The Chinese antiques sold by him are the most convincing to collectors. Therefore, every time Lu Qinzhai has a new product from China, collectors rush to get a sneak peek to snap up their favorite antiques. Among the national treasures he sold to the United States were the reliefs of the Six Horses of the Zhaoling Tombs (fig. 4) (fig. 4), which were sold to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. When Lu Qinzhai sold his antiques to Americans in New York, he often started with an exhibition and published a catalogue of the exhibits, which he sold as he went. From his exhibition catalogue, we can see that there are stone statues from the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan, the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, Shanxi Province, the Tianlongshan Grottoes in Taiyuan, and the Xiangtangshan Grottoes in Handan, Hebei, as well as a large number of individual stone statues and statue tablets from Chinese Buddhist monasteries. [2] These Buddhist carvings were later collected by several prestigious museums in the United States, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City and the Freer Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., and some in private collections. Some people say that in the first half of the 20th century, half of the antiques that flowed overseas from China passed through Lu Qinzhai. Although this statement is an exaggeration, it can illustrate the importance of Lou's position in the American antiques world at that time.
Fig.4 "Sa Lu Zi" from the Six Horses of the Zhaoling Tomb of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty on display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (photographed by the author)
The evaluation of Lu Qinzhai is diametrically opposed to that of China and the West. In the eyes of Westerners, Lu was the preeminent dealer of Chinese art and antiques in the first half of the 20th century, and he single-handedly introduced early Chinese art to Europe and the United States. Lu Qinzhai was praised as an enlightener for the West to understand Chinese antiques, and for European and American collectors to appreciate the beauty of Chinese cultural relics. His expertise and vision for antiquities have won over collectors in Europe and the United States. Without Lu's contribution, there would be no basis for the collections of Chinese art in many of the great American museums. In addition, he also created a number of large Western collectors or family collections, such as J. J. Brown. P. Morgan, Samuel Peters, Alfred Pillsbury, and Henry Clay Frick. In his later years, Lu Qinzhai evaluated his life with a little guilt. "I am ashamed to be one of the sources of the loss of national treasures," he said. The only thing that can justify us is that none of the works of art came directly from us, and they were acquired in competition with other buyers on the public market. China has lost its national treasure, but the only consolation is that art knows no borders, and these sculptures, which are admired by scholars and the public, may benefit China more than any living ambassador. Through these artworks, China can become more famous in the outside world. Due to the war and great changes in China, our historical monuments may be better protected in other countries. Our lost national treasures will serve as true messengers for the world to understand our ancient civilization and culture, thereby serving to create love and better understanding of China and the Chinese people. [3] The Chinese, on the other hand, prefer to judge him in terms of the objective consequences of the Lu Qinzhai Antiques Company on ancient Chinese artifacts. Although he claimed not to have been directly involved in the destruction of Chinese historical sites and artifacts, including the theft of Buddhist statues in the caves, the artworks were lost through his hands. There is no seller without a buyer, and he is the most important bridge between buyers and sellers in this industry.
Another major antique dealer selling ancient Chinese art is the Yamanaka & Company, which was established by the Japanese. The actual developer of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce was Yamanaka Jojiro (1866-1936), which was founded in Osaka, Japan (Figure 5). Yamanaka Jojiro, formerly known as Anda Jojiro, was born into a family of antique dealers in Osaka and has a family background in running an antique shop. As a result, he studied antiques with his father at a family antique shop from an early age, which aroused his interest in the antique business. At the age of thirteen, Jojiro Adachi began his career as an antique dealer as an apprentice at the Yamanaka Yoshibei antique shop, which was famous in Osaka at the time. Through study and study, he has accumulated considerable business experience and knowledge of cultural relics, and has also come into contact with many scholars and collectors from Europe and the United States, opening a door to the Western antiques world and realizing the huge business opportunities of oriental art in the Western antiques market. At the age of 23, it was a crucial period in his life's work. Yamanaka Yoshibei, the owner of the antique shop where he was an apprentice, married his eldest daughter to him, and he joined the Yamanaka family, changed his surname to Yamanaka, and began to work hard to introduce the antique business of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce to the European and American markets. In 1894, he opened an antique store in New York, USA (Fig. 6), followed by branches in Boston and Chicago. In 1900, he opened a representative in London and in 1905 in Paris. As a result, the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce established and developed its own network of Oriental art sales in the antique industry in Europe and the United States, trying its best to meet the demand of European high society for Oriental culture and art. Therefore, there is no doubt that with the participation of Yamanaka Dingjiro, the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce was able to establish a market in Europe and the United States, and he himself also established good relations with American giant customers, such as the American oil magnate John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937).
Fig. 5 Above: Yamanaka Jojiro (1866-1936) and below: Yamanaka Jojiro (front row, second from left) with his Beijing branch staff
Fig. 6 The Antique Shop of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce in New York, photographed in 1925
One of the main sources of antiques for the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce is China, which has a long history, rich collection of cultural relics and works of art, and the most active antique market. The main purpose of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce is to acquire oriental artifacts and sell them to Europe and the United States for profit. In order to better acquire ancient art in China, in 1894, Yamanaka Seijiro, the head of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce, opened the first antique branch of the Japanese antiques industry in China at Chongwenmen in Beijing, specializing in the acquisition of Chinese antiquities. Through more than 30 years of operation in China, the Shanzhong Chamber of Commerce has collected a large number of precious works of art from China, resulting in the loss of countless Chinese national treasures overseas. The rise of the Shanzhong Chamber of Commerce in China benefited from the historical and social transformation and development at that time. At that time, Beijing was at the beginning of the establishment of the Republic of China and the change of dynasties, and the antique market was also in an active period. In May 1900, Wang Yuanji, a Taoist priest and administrator of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, discovered the cave of the Tibetan scriptures, which Western scholars called the library of the Chinese Middle Ages, which was the first major discovery in the field of Chinese archaeological relics in the 20th century. However, in the following ten years, most of the tens of thousands of manuscript cultural relics and hundreds of Buddhist paintings were lost overseas, which shocked the Western academic and cultural relics collection circles, greatly stimulated the antique market, and attracted many Western explorers, scholars, collectors, and antique dealers. In the early years of the Republic of China, a large number of bronzes, pottery, and jade artifacts were excavated from the Shang Dynasty ruins in Xiaotun, Anyang, Henan; a large number of bronzes, and bronze artifacts were unearthed from the Western Zhou Dynasty ruins in Zhouyuan, Shaanxi; numerous ancient tombs of the past dynasties in Pishan in the north of Luoyang were stolen and excavated, and countless cultural relics buried underground, such as terracotta figurines, bronzes, and jades, flowed into the cultural relics and antique markets in Beijing, Shanghai, and other places; and many antiques, calligraphy and paintings collected by the imperial family of the former Qing Dynasty also entered the market with the sale of the last emperor Puyi (1906-1967). In 1928, the warlord Sun Dianying (1889-1947) excavated the Qing Dynasty's Western Tombs, once again allowing a large number of Qing Dynasty treasures to flow into the antique market. It can be said that in the early years of the Republic of China, the Chinese antiques market was extremely active, and it was a period when Western collectors and antique dealers bought a large number of ancient works of art in China, which brought opportunities for the development of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce in China.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce purchased countless cultural relics and works of art from China, including bronzes, ceramics, jade, Buddhist statues, paintings, paintings, furniture, etc., and then sold them to art galleries and private collections around the world. Among the Chinese cultural relics lost through the hands of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce, the most distressing is a large number of stone carvings hewn from the grottoes. The grottoes, which are Buddhist monasteries carved in the cliffs on the banks of the river, are an art form that integrates architecture, sculpture and painting. The caves originated in India. With the spread of Buddhism in China, the art of cave temples has gradually emerged in China since the 4th century, represented by the existing Yungang Grottoes in Datong, Shanxi, Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu, and Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan. However, in the early 20th century, when Western explorers went to China to search for treasures, and when Western antique dealers and collectors went to China to buy ancient art, China's cave temple art suffered great man-made destruction. Many murals and clay statues in the Baizi Creek Grottoes in Turpan and the Kizil Grottoes in Baicheng were removed by Europeans. In the north of the Central Plains, the Yungang Grottoes were stolen and destroyed more than 1,400 Buddhist statues, Longmen Grottoes, Hebei Handan Xiangtangshan Grottoes, Henan Gongxian Dalishan Grottoes have also encountered theft and chisel, resulting in the loss of a large number of exquisite stone carving works, many of which are still missing. The Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce was the main driver behind the loss of these cave statues overseas. The most severely damaged was the Tianlongshan Grottoes in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. In 1924 and 1926, Yamanaka visited the Tenryusan Grottoes and was fascinated by the exquisite Buddhist carvings (Fig. 7). [4] After 1927, the Shanzhong Chamber of Commerce participated in the theft of the statues of the Tianlongshan Grottoes, and more than 150 exquisite carvings were stolen and chiseled in the 25 caves excavated in the Eastern Wei, Northern Qi, Sui, and Tang dynasties, which can be said to have basically destroyed the entire grotto complex (Fig. 8). I don't dare to say that these thefts were all carried out by the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce, but at least most of the carved carvings that were chiseled were dispersed abroad through their hands, entering the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. [5] The famous American collector Charles Lang Fler (1854-1919) and his museum purchased stone carvings from the grottoes of Dalishan, Longmen, and Xiangtangshan in Gongxian County from the Shanzhong Chamber of Commerce. In addition to the cave statues, the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce also acquired and sold a large number of Chinese individual statues and statue tablets. The exhibition catalogue published by the Yamanaka Shokai in the same year records the final state of these national treasures as they passed from the hands of the Yamanaka Shokai to various museums and private collections.
Figure 7 ˉ Yamanaka Dingjiro in the 20s of the 20th century in the Tenryushan Grottoes
Fig. 8 ̉ The south wall of the central pillar of Cave 8 of Tianlongshan Grottoes in Taiyuan, Shanxi
There are also many antique dealers who act as a bridge between the Chinese and Western antiques markets, and they have opened their own antique shops across the United States to buy and sell antiquities. Lo's company and the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce are just two of the largest and most well-known in this vast network of Western antique dealers.
2. The curator and the American Museum's collection of Chinese art
Unlike contemporary museums in China, curators in museums in the United States and the West are responsible for acquiring artifacts and works of art for museums that serve them. The artworks acquired by the curators for the museum come from antique dealers, auction houses, private collectors, and the origin of the artworks. For museums, without the efforts of curators to use their knowledge of art identification, even the provenance of cultural relics is in vain.
Langdon Warner (1881-1955) was an American archaeologist and East Asian art historian. He graduated from Harvard University in 1903 and returned to his alma mater in 1905 to study archaeology for a year. After 1906, he studied in Japan, specializing in Buddhist art. In 1910, he investigated Buddhist art in Korea and Japan, and in 1913 he opened the first course of Oriental art at Harvard University. He came to China in 1916 to collect Chinese artifacts for the newly established Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. In 1923, he returned to Harvard, where he became a professor and curator of oriental art at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and began to organize archaeological teams to China to investigate the Silk Road. Warner and his entourage arrived in Beijing in July 1923, where their expedition to China was facilitated by the warlord Wu Peifu (1874-1939), who was a direct member of the warlord at the time. They inspected Xi'an and Heishui City, but they did not gain much. Warner arrived in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang in January 1924, and his original target was probably the ancient manuscripts and paintings in the caves (fig. 9). But at that time, the cave was empty, and there were no more documents to be taken. So, he shifted his focus to the statues and murals in the caves. According to the statistics of the Dunhuang Institute of Cultural Relics, Warner used adhesive tape to remove and damage the murals of the early Tang Dynasty caves in the Mogao Grottoes, including 26 square murals in the Dunhuang Cultural Relics Research Institute No. 320, 321, 328, 329, 331, 335, and 372, totaling 32,006 square centimeters. Among them, the early Tang Dynasty paintings include the story painting of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (reigned 141-87 BC) who sent Zhang Qian (?-114 BC) to the Western Regions to welcome the Golden Buddha, and the mural painting of important stories about the history of the nation and the history of Chinese Buddhism. When Warner stripped the murals in Dunhuang, due to the low level of conservation technology, it caused man-made damage. In addition, with the consent of the Taoist priest Wang Yuanji, Warner removed a 120-centimeter-high half-kneeling painted Bodhisattva statue from Cave 328 excavated in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) (Fig. 10). He also purchased a fragment of the Dunhuang manuscript "Myoho-renge-kyo". Due to the cold temperature, Warner returned to Lanzhou in April 1924 and returned to China via Beijing. These precious Dunhuang artworks are now in the collection of the Arthur M. Arthur Art, Harvard University, USA. Warner also wrote a book based on his own experience called "On China's Long Ancient Road". [6]
Fig. 9 Warner's expedition to China in the twenties of the twentieth century
Please view it horizontally
Fig. 10ˉ Warner when he moves the half-kneeling painted statue of the Bodhisattva from Cave 328 of the Mogao Caves
Another person who traveled to China to acquire artifacts was Alan Priest (1898-1969), curator of Oriental art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the beginning of the 30s of the 20th century, Pu Ellen came to the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang. Among the many Buddha sculptures, he is the only one who loves the Binyang Middle Cave dug by Emperor Xuanwu of the Northern Wei Dynasty (reigned 499-515) for his father Emperor Xiaowen (reigned 471-499) and his empress. On the front wall of this cave, there are large reliefs "Emperor Buddha Ceremony" and "Empress Buddha Ceremony", showing the scene of Emperor Xiaowen and his empress worshipping Buddha surrounded by his entourage. Pu Ellen wanted to chisel the "Emperor's Rite of Buddha" and transport it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for collection and exhibition. But Pellen clearly couldn't do it on her own. So, in 1934, he traveled to Beijing and signed a contract with Yue Bin (?-1954), an antique dealer from Liulichang, who offered to pay 14,000 silver dollars to buy the relief from Yue Bin (fig. 11). [7] But Yue Bin and his company were unable to do this alone. Yue Bin asked Ma Longtu, an antique dealer in Luoyang, for help, and was willing to pay Ma 5,000 silver dollars. Then, Ma Longtu asked Wang Menglin, the chief of the armor of Yanggou Village, Yanshi County, opposite the Longmen Grottoes, and the bandits Wang Dongli, Wang Mao, and Wang Kui to help, and paid them 2,000 silver dollars. Wang Menglin and others coerced the stonemasons Wang Guangxi, Wang Shui, and Wang Huicheng in the same village to go to Binyang Zhongdong to steal and chisel the "Emperor's Rite Buddha" and "Queen's Rite Buddha". At that time, the Longmen Grottoes were not only unmanaged, but also a busy highway in front of the caves. The three stonemasons had to sneak into the cave at night to steal the chisels. They chiseled first the heads of the statues, and then the bodies of the statues. Wang Menglin only paid a small fee for the three stonemasons. The chiseled pieces were shipped to Yue Bin's company in Beijing. As a result, Ellen was given the Emperor's Rite of the Buddha, which was inducted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1935 (fig. 12).
Please view it horizontally
Fig. 11 ̉ The contract signed between Pu Ellen and Yue Bin in 1934 (from Cultural Relics Reference, No. 7, 1955, fig. 4)
Fig. 12ˉ The Emperor Rite Buddha in Binyang Middle Cave, Longmen Grottoes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, Northern Wei Dynasty
This is just one example of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's acquisition of Chinese Buddhist art. The largest museum in the United States and one of the top three in the world, its Far Eastern Art Department, founded in 1915 and renamed the Asian Art Department in 1986, has 64,500 square feet of exhibition halls. Through the efforts of successive curators, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of more than 60,000 pieces of Asian art, from the Neolithic period to the 21st century, including calligraphy, paintings, prints, sculptures, metalware, ceramics, lacquerware, silk fabrics, etc. Most of the Chinese Buddhist statues in this museum were acquired in the 20s and 50s of the 20th century, and the source of the artifacts is mainly from private collectors. These include the world-famous gilded bronze statue of the Buddha of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534) made in 524, the rare seated Buddha statue of the Sui Dynasty (581-618), the Buddhist carvings of the Northern Qi and Tang dynasties from the Longmen Grottoes, the Xiangtangshan Grottoes and the Tianlongshan Grottoes, the large-scale Yuan Dynasty mural of the Medicine Buddha Sutra from the main hall of Guangshengxia Temple in Hongdong, Shanxi Province (Fig. 13), and a large number of single stone statues, wooden statues, gold and bronze statues from the Northern Wei Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Clay statues, statue tablets, etc., are rare material materials for the study of the history of Chinese Buddhist art. [8]
Fig. 13 – Early Chinese Buddhist art gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Empress Buddha Portrait from Binyang Middle Cave in Longmen Grottoes was eventually collected by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, USA (fig. 14). After Yue Bin got his hands on this large relief, perhaps no one could buy the whole relief at a high price, so he did not sell the whole relief to anyone, but sold it in many small pieces, all of which were scattered to Europe in 1934-1935. Laurence Sickman (1907-1988, fig. 15), the first curator of Oriental art and the second director of the Nelson Museum of Art, was responsible for the recombination of the Queen's Rite and Buddha Painting. After years of searching by Schckman and the director of the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, Sckman collected most of the hundreds of pieces of rubble from the Queen's Rite of the Buddha, and after two years of restoration, the relief was finally restored and exhibited in the new Chinese sculpture gallery at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1941. [9] While contemporary Chinese deplore Chinese antique dealers and foreign curators, scholars, or collectors who have lost China's national treasures in the antiques trade, the Chinese government and people have great respect for Skerman and thank him for making it possible, even though it is still preserved in the United States. As for Yue Bin, according to Chinese scholars, the Chinese government arrested him and imprisoned him in 1952. He died in prison in Beijing in 1954.
Fig.14ˉ The Empress Buddha from Binyang Middle Cave in Longmen Grottoes, collected by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, USA, Northern Wei Dynasty
Figure 15 ˉ Skerman in 1943
Skerman is a well-known modern American art historian and sinologist. As early as his high school days, he was interested in Japanese and Chinese art. He graduated from Harvard University in 1930 and is fluent in Chinese. Subsequently, with funding from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he visited many historical sites in China. When Sckman visited China, he met Warner, his former teacher at Harvard, and it turned a turning point in his life's work. Warner was a member of the board of directors of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, where he was commissioned to build a collection of oriental art. In 1931, Skerman joined the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art as Warner's assistant. In 1935, he became the museum's curator of Oriental art. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opened in 1933 and was named after William Rockhill Nelson (1841-1915), founder of The Kansas City Star. Later, with an $11 million grant from the Nelson Foundation, Sckman was responsible for the purchase of many Chinese paintings, sculptures, bronzes, ceramics, furniture, and more for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, from the Neolithic period to the Qing Dynasty, where he studied these Chinese artworks. Thanks to Sckman's efforts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has become one of the world's leading museums for collecting and exhibiting Chinese art. Today, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art has a collection of more than 7,500 pieces of Chinese art, which was formed on the basis of the collection established by Skerman. In its collection of Chinese Buddhist art, there are the famous Song Dynasty (960-1279) wood carving water moon Guanyin statue from Shanxi, Buddhist carvings carved from the Longmen and Tianlongshan grottoes, single statues and statue tablets from Chinese Buddhist temples, exquisite large-scale murals of the Yuan Dynasty from the main hall of Guangshengxia Temple in Hongdong, Shanxi, and the ceiling of the main hall of Zhihua Temple in Beijing, one of the treasures of Chinese Buddhist temples. During World War II, Skerman enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked for a time in Tokyo after the U.S. occupation of Japan. This was very helpful for him to understand the history of Japanese art. After the war, Sckman returned to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where he served as director from 1953 to 1977. When he was in Tokyo, Japan, there was a scholar named Sherman Lee who worked with him.
Sherman Lee (1918-2008) was another well-known Asian art historian in the United States (fig. 16). From 1939 to 1941, Lee worked as a research assistant at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, USA, where he completed his doctoral dissertation at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. In 1941, he became curator of Far Eastern art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a position he held until 1946. In 1948, Lee joined the Seattle Museum of Art, where he became assistant director, and in 1951 became its deputy director. During this time, he lectured on Asian art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1952, Lee returned to Cleveland to become the museum's curator of Oriental art. He became Assistant Curator in 1957 and Deputy Curator and Curator in 1958 until his retirement in 1983. During his long tenure at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Lee acquired a large number of Asian artworks, including a huge number of high-quality Chinese artifacts, including Buddhist statues, bronzes, gold and silverware, paintings and calligraphy, and the museum became one of the world's leading collections of Asian art (fig. 17). The Cleveland Museum of Art's Chinese Buddhist artworks include the Beiliang (397-439) small stone pagoda from Gansu Province made in 435, the five marble standing Buddha statues of the Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577), the huge Tang Dynasty stone carved 11-sided Guanyin statue, the Tang Dynasty finely made dry lacquer seated Bodhisattva statue, and the Song Dynasty wood carving and painted standing Bodhisattva statue. The collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art is also extremely famous in the world of painting and calligraphy, which is also due to Lee. Lee was also invited by the oil magnate Rockefeller Foundation to buy Asian art for them, much of the collection was later donated to the Asia Society museum in New York. After retiring in 1983, Lee moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the following year, where he was hired as a visiting professor at The University of North Carolina to teach Asian art history. Since then, he has helped collect Asian art at the University of North Carolina's Ackland Art Museum and donated more than 100 pieces of Asian art from his collection, including Chinese Buddhist statues. When I was working at the Acron Museum of Art from 2006 to 2008, I met Lee and his family four times. In 2008, Lee passed away at the age of 90. The following year, the Cleveland Museum of Art, where Lee had previously worked, held "Streams and Mountains without End," and the Akrand Museum of Art also hosted "Sage in the Bamboo Grove," an exhibition in honor of the Asian art historian. Lee's A History of Far Eastern Art, published in 1964, has been revised and reprinted five times and remains a required textbook for many universities studying Asian art history.
Figure 16 Sherman Lee
Figure 17 ˉ Cleveland Museum of Art
These Asian art curators are just a few of the many curators in the United States who are well-known and can see their backgrounds, the nature of their work, their major accomplishments, and their special role in a museum's collection of Asian art.
III. Collectors' Contributions to American Museums
Although curators have also taken the initiative to acquire artifacts for the museum's collection, the main source of art in the major museums in the United States is donations from private collections. Similar to Europe, the United States is a country where the whole nation loves art, and scholars and professors who study art have a high social status and are respected in the United States. Most of the industrial and commercial tycoons in the United States and the people who got rich through various channels did not have the bad habit of eating, drinking, prostituting and gambling, nor did they have the social custom of passing on their property to future generations (American children have no obligation to support their parents after the age of 18, and children are ashamed to reach out to their parents for money after that time), but set up charitable foundations with their money, or donate their property to various social welfare undertakings, including education and museums. As a result, museums large and small in the United States are basically established through private donations, and most of the collections in the museums come from private donations or are purchased with money from private donations. The purpose of this private donation is to give back to the society and to make oneself famous forever. As a result, privately donated museums or exhibition halls are often named after the donor, such as the Freer Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., the Aqueland Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. In addition, the name of the sponsor or donor of the exhibit should be written on the exhibit description board of each exhibition. With more than 100 years of private donations, several world-renowned museums with rich collections of Asian art (including Chinese art) have emerged in the United States, such as the aforementioned Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Here are some of the great collectors' contributions to the collections of Chinese art in several prominent museums in the United States.
Boston, the capital of Massachusetts in the northeastern United States and the largest port city in New England, was founded in 1630 and is known as the "oldest city" in the United States. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, founded in 1870, is one of the most famous museums in the United States (Fig. 18). The foundations of its collection of Asian art were laid by the collector Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908) (fig. 19). Fenorosa was an American professor of philosophy and political economy in Tokyo, Japan. At that time, he was fond of oriental art and collected many traditional Japanese artworks. In 1886, he sold his collection to Charles Goddard Weld (1857-1911), a physician in Boston, on the condition that it enter the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1890, Fenorosa returned to Boston to become curator of the museum's Department of Oriental Art. In 1894, he held the first exhibition of Chinese painting in Boston. During his tenure as curator, he also acquired a large number of Chinese artworks for the museum. In 1897, he returned to Japan and became a professor of English language and literature at the Tokyo Normal School (now the University of Tsukuba). Thanks to the continued efforts of later curators, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, became one of the best museums in the Western world. The Museum of Fine Arts' Asian art collection in Boston focuses on Japanese, Chinese, and Indian paintings and sculptures. Among them, China's art era spans a large range, from the Neolithic Age to modern art, including ceramics, bronzes, paintings, calligraphy, silk fabrics, sculptures, jade, lacquerware and other types. In the collection of Chinese Buddhist art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, there are exquisitely carved stone statues of the Sui Dynasty standing Bodhisattvas with a height of 2.49 meters, and there is an extremely rare group of gilded bronze statues of the Buddha and his attendants on the altar made in 593, which have been seen in Chinese and foreign treatises many times. [10]
Figure 18 ̉ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Figure 19 Fenorosa
The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was donated by the famous Oriental art collector Freer [11] (fig. 20). Freer was born on February 25, 1856, in Kingston, New York. In 1873, Freer began his railroad career, working for a train-making company. In 1900, Freer retired from his active business at the age of 44. For the last 19 years of his life, Freer devoted himself to the research and development of his art collection with great interest. In the early 80s of the 19th century, Freer began his art collection. From 1888 onwards, he turned more and more attention to Japanese art, and with it turned his collection to classical Chinese art. Freer visited East Asia and China four times, in 1895, 1907, 1909, and 1910-1911. During these trips and visits, Freer researched a number of public and private art collections, discussed issues with local scholars and collectors, and purchased works of art that interested him to enrich his collection. Freer's diaries and letters show what he learned from these interviews and how humble he was about his knowledge. Even after he became an important collector, he continued to treat people with humility. Freer's most important trip to China was his last visit in 1910-1911. [12] During this trip, Freer visited places of interest in Beijing, Kaifeng, Gongxian, Luoyang, Hangzhou (fig. 21), Shenyang, and other places, as well as collectors in Shanghai, where he purchased a large number of ancient works of art. Freer not only donated his lifelong collection of art to the Smithsonian Institution and provided funds to build an art gallery that would collect and exhibit his art, but also used his own money to set up a fund with the proceeds of the fund to purchase more Oriental art and fund research projects on Oriental civilization for the museum in the future. He also made his own will so that any scholar or student studying Oriental art could enter the museum's storerooms to study works of art that he did not exhibit in the exhibition halls. This unique regulation in the world has provided great convenience for countless scholars and students. We can also see Freer's contribution to Oriental art and his expectations for the younger generations of scholars. On May 2, 1923, the Freer Museum of Fine Arts was officially opened to the public. Freer bequeathed about 9,000 works of art to the state, and about 2,000 more were added to his collection. In the mid and late 20th century, the Freer Museum's collection increased dramatically not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality (fig. 22).
Fig. 20 Freel, circa 1905
Fig. 21 Freer in Hangzhou, 1911
Fig. 22 – One of the exhibition halls of Chinese Buddhist sculpture at the Freer Museum of Fine Arts, 2013
Another world-renowned museum with a collection of traditional Chinese art is The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in California. San Francisco was home to 19th-century Chinese coolie gold panning. The foundation of the museum's collection of Chinese art was founded by the collector Avery Brundage (1887-1975, fig. 23). Brundage was President of the 15th International Olympic Committee (1952-1972). He was born into a working-class family in Detroit. His interest in Asian art came from his visit to an exhibition of Chinese art at the Royal Academy of Art in London after the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, in early 1936. But he really began collecting Asian art after a two-week visit to Japan in 1939. Later, he visited Shanghai and Hong Kong in China. Similar to Freer, he has a good knowledge of Asian art, and as such, he has the ability to buy top-notch art and is rarely deceived by those unscrupulous antique dealers. His fine jade collection ranges from the Neolithic to the contemporary, and he also has hundreds of bronze and Buddhist statues from China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, including carvings carved from the Longmen Grottoes. Most astonishingly, he purchased from Lu Qinzhai the world-famous gilded bronze seated Buddha (fig. 24) cast in the fourth year of the Later Zhao Dynasty (319-351) in the fourth year of the reign of Jianwu (fig. 24), which is the earliest Chinese Buddhist statue ever discovered, and has been mentioned and published in countless books and papers, because no monograph on the history of Chinese Buddhist art can avoid this image. [13] This gold and bronze Buddha statue also made the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco famous all over the world. He also has a collection of Buddhist carvings from the Longmen Grottoes and Xiangtangshan Grottoes, as well as several brick reliefs from the famous Tang Dynasty pavilion-style pagoda in Xiuding Temple in Anyang, Henan. [14] In a 1948 article on Brundage published in Life magazine, historian and journalist Roger Butterfield (?-1981) said: "His collection is considered one of the largest and most important in the country." [15] In 1959, Brundage agreed to donate part of his collection to the City of San Francisco. The following year, San Francisco citizens voted to approve a $2,725,000 bond issue to house Brundage's donations. This is the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, which opened to the public in 1966. In 2003, the building moved to a new location in the Civic Center (Fig. 25). In 1969, Brundage donated a portion of his collection to the museum and made a will to donate all remaining collections to the Asian Art Museum after his death. Today, the museum has about 7,700 pieces of Brundage's collection, while the entire museum's collection of Asian art is more than 17,000 pieces, including many Chinese jades, ceramics, lacquerware, silk fabrics, furniture, weapons, Buddhist statues and monuments, which are very systematic displays of Asian art history.
Figure 23 Brundage
Fig. 24ˉ Later Zhao (319-351) 4th year of Jianwu (338) gilt bronze seated Buddha, 39.7 cm high, collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Fig. 25ˉ The Chinese Buddhist art gallery at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Arthur Mitchell Sackler (1913-1987) was another collector who made a special contribution to the collection and exhibition of Chinese art in the United States (fig. 26). M. Sackler was a well-known American psychiatrist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He graduated from New York University School of Medicine with a bachelor's and master's degree. In 1960, Mr. Sackler began publishing his weekly magazine, Medical Tribune, and subsequently established his Laboratories for Therapeutic Research. He also edited and published the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology. His wealth came from his medical advertising business, medical treatment publications, over-the-counter drug products sold over the counter. He funded the establishment of medical institutes named after him, such as the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in Israel, which was founded in 1972. He is known as the "Father of Contemporary Pharmaceutical Advertising".
Fig. 26 M. Sackler, Japan, 1976
But at the same time, Sackler was also an art scholar and collector, and began buying art in 1950. He often buys the entire collection of what he considers to be a good collector. By the 60s of the 20th century, he had amassed a collection of thousands of Chinese and ancient Near Eastern art, including a large number of high-quality Chinese artworks, some of which came directly from the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce and Lu Qinzhai. He also donated to many art museums, such as the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C Institution), and the Jillian & Arthur M. Sackler Wing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He also donated galleries to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Princeton University Art Museum. His donations to museums or exhibition halls are often accompanied by donations from a large number of his collections, such as the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Washington. His donations include Chinese Buddhist art, such as the magnificent Yuan Dynasty "Medicine Buddha Sutra Changes" mural from the main hall of Guangshengxia Temple in Hongdong, Shanxi Province, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also donated a collection of Chinese artifacts to Columbia University in New York, but the university does not have a museum, so the artwork he donated has long been stored in the basement of the university's library, including many exquisite Buddhist statues from the Longmen Grottoes and Xiangtangshan Grottoes. [16] Sackler's daughter, Elizabeth Sackler, followed in her father's footsteps and was also an art donor. She funded the establishment of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which opened in 2007.
By the way, Harvard University with the M. M. Sackler Museum in Washington (Fig. 27). The Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University opened to the public in 1985, and all the artworks from the Fogg Art Museum's collection were transferred to the museum's collection and exhibited. The collection is home to a vast collection of ancient European, Asian, Islamic and Indian art, including the finest Chinese jade, bronze, weapons and Buddhist sculptures, as well as ceramics, lacquer and prints from Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Warner's Dunhuang murals and painted sculptures excavated in China are on display there, as well as gold and bronze Gandhara-style seated Buddha statues made during the Sixteen Kingdoms (304-439) period, and stone Buddha statues from the Tianlongshan Grottoes. The M. Sackler Gallery, located on the National Plaza in downtown Washington, D.C., is located next to the Freer Museum of Art and opened to the public in 1987. The museum houses more than 1,000 pieces of Asian art donated by M. M. Sackler, including individual Chinese Buddhist statues and monuments, such as the Tang Dynasty stone Buddha head from the Longmen Grottoes. The Freer and M. Sackler museums in Washington, D.C., are two adjacent museums, but share the same administrative and research teams.
Figure 27 ˉ The M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C
In addition to these museums, there are many other museums in the United States that house Chinese Buddhist art, such as The Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual in Stanford, California Arts at Stanford University), Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio, Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, and more. There are also a number of small art museums in the United States, many of which also house Chinese Buddhist art to a greater or lesser extent. The Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), also located in North America, also has a large collection of Chinese Buddhist art, including murals, gold and bronze statues, single stone statues, statue tablets, etc. In fact, there are about 1.6 million pieces of ancient Chinese art in public museums throughout the Western world, including Japan, but this is only about 20 percent of the total loss of Chinese artefacts. For example, Dora Wong, a long-time Chinese female collector who lives in New York, has a large collection of Chinese Buddhist stone statues, including carvings from the Yungang Grottoes and Longmen Grottoes. [17] So, how many Chinese Buddhist art are in the hands of all Western private collectors?
epilogue
The collection of ancient Chinese art in the United States owes the work of three main people: museum curators, antique dealers, and collectors. One of the curators' responsibilities is to expand the museum's collection, and they are the front-line people who directly plan the purchase of artworks for the museum. Antiques dealers move between China and the United States, bridging the gap between the Chinese antiquities market and the American demanders. Private collectors are the backbone of the American collecting scene, and the majority of the museum's collection comes from them. Most of the channels through which these three types of people developed their large and small public and private collections in the United States were legitimate, but there were also cases of taking advantage of the war or turmoil in China to take advantage of the immoral means to acquire art. In general, the collection of ancient Chinese art in the United States comes from three types of people: antique dealers, curators, and collectors.
Exegesis:
[1]参见Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia（《丝绸之路上的魔鬼：探索失去的中国中亚古城与珍宝》）(Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980)。
[2]参见C.T.Loo（芦芹斋）编, An Exhibition of Chinese Stone Sculpture（《中国石雕展》）(New York:C.T. Too & Co.,1940)。
[3] C.T.Loo,An Exhibition of Chinese Stone Sculpture, “Preface.”
[4] Yamanaka Dingjiro, "Tenryuzan Stone Collection", Yamanaka Shokai, 1928.
[5]关于山中商会出售的天龙山石窟雕像，参见山中商会举办的文物展览图录，如Yamanaka & Company, Inc.,Exhibition of Early Chinese Bronzes,Stone Sculptures and Potteries（《早期中国青铜器、石雕、陶器展》）(New York,1926), Collection of Chinese and Other Far Eastern Art（《中国与其他远东艺术收藏》）(New York,1943)。
[6] Langdon Warner, The Long Old Road in China (New York: Doubleday, Page & company, 1926).
[7] See Wang Shixiang, "The Seven Centers of the Records of the American Emperor Collecting Cultural Relics in the Mainland", Cultural Relics, No. 7, 1955, pp. 45-55.
[8]大都会艺术博物馆藏中国佛教雕塑的总体情況，参见Denise Patry Leidy and Donna Strahan, Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art（《体现慈悲：大都会艺术博物馆的中国佛道雕塑》） (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010)。
[9] See Li Song et al., Ancient Chinese Sculpture, translated by Chen Yunqian et al., Foreign Languages Press, Yale University Press, 2003, plates 3-43.
[10]该馆收藏的亚洲艺术品精华，参见Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (ed.), Selected Masterpieces of Asian Art（《亚洲艺术精品选》）(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992)。
[11] John A. Pope, “Preface（序言）,” 刊于The Freer Gallery of Art: China（《弗利尔美术馆：中国》）（Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd., 1971），第9—14页。
[12] Charles Lan Freer, "The Endless Light of Buddha: Freer's 1910 Journey to the Dragon Gate", translated by Li Wen and Wang Yiyou, Shanghai Painting and Calligraphy Publishing House, 2014.
[13] C.T.Loo & Cie, An Exhibition of Ancient Chinese Ritual Bronzes（《古代中国祭祀铜器》）(Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Institute of Art, 1940).
[14] Rene-Yvon Lefebvre d’Argence(ed.), The Avery Brundage Collection: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Sculpture（《布伦戴奇的收藏：中国、朝鲜、日本雕塑》）(San Francisco: The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and Kodansha, 1974).
[15] Roger Butterfield, “Avery Brundage,”Life (June 14, 1948).
[16] Leo Swergold and Eileen Hsu, Treasures Rediscovered: Chinese Stone Sculpture from the Sackler Collections at Columbia University(《珍宝重现：哥伦比亚大学赛克勒藏品中的中国石雕》）(New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, 2008).
[17] Ma Xinle, "Dora Wong and Her Rhino Horn Carving Collection", Collection, No. 3, 2010.
Chang Qing is a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History from the University of Kansas, a postdoctoral fellow at the Asian Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Arts, Sichuan University.
This article was originally published on pages 18~26 of the 8th issue of "Grand View of Fine Arts" in 2022.