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(b Busan, March 4, 1951; d New York, Nov 5, 1982).

Korean artist and writer active in the USA. Cha was born and raised in Busan, Korea, moving to Hawaii with her parents in the mid-1960s, and then later to San Francisco. Trained in French from early adolescence, she studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, including the works of Stéphane Mallarmé. As part of her theoretical studies, Cha also majored in visual art, first concentrating on ceramics and then moving to performance-based work under the tutelage of James Melchert (b 1930). After graduating in both disciplines in 1973 and 1975 respectively, Cha continued her studies in visual art at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving an MFA in 1978. During this time, she studied abroad in Paris at the Centre d’Etudes Américain du Cinéma in 1976, working with psychoanalytic theorists such as Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour. Works created during this time were based on symbols, the manipulation of language via experimentation with font, scale and the placement of words, as well as cinematic devices such as the fade....

[Tei shin; Kanō Yeitan Masanobu]

(b Salem, MA, Feb 18, 1853; d London, Sept 21, 1908).

American curator, scholar, collector, and educator. Fenollosa played a unique role in enhancing the appreciation of Japanese art in both its native country and within the USA. Educated at Harvard, after graduation he studied philosophy and divinity at Cambridge University, followed by a year at the newly founded art school at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He also formed important friendships with the collectors Edward Sylvester Morse, Charles Goddard Weld (1857–1911), and William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926).

In 1878, with an introduction from Morse, Fenollosa travelled to Japan for the first time, accompanied by his new wife, Lizzie Goodhue Millett, to teach political economy and philosophy at Tokyo’s Imperial University. Embracing Japanese art and culture, he became an active advocate for preserving the country’s art treasures and, with the Japanese artists Kanō Hōgai (see Kanō family §(16)) and Hashimoto Gahō, helped to revive the ...

(b Nagasaki, Nov 8, 1867; d St Petersburg, FL, Nov 21, 1944).

American writer and lecturer of Japanese birth. He was born to a Japanese mother and German father and brought up by relatives in Hamburg and, from 1882, in Philadelphia, where he studied art. Under the influence of the poet Walt Whitman, he decided to become a writer. Later he worked as a journalist in Boston, where he launched a literary magazine. When publication ceased, he moved to New York and began his freelance career.

Hartmann’s first article for Camera Notes was published in 1898 by Alfred Stieglitz, and he made regular contributions to Camera Work until 1904, but thereafter he published wherever he could and became a lecturer. He was one of the best-known spokesmen for photography in America, criticizing any work that did not make use of the fundamental qualities of the medium. A severe judge of early American painting, he singled out only Gilbert Stuart and John Vanderlyn for praise. Among later 19th-century American painters he preferred followers of the Barbizon school. His impact as a critic had lessened by the 1920s, although his views on the standards of 20th-century painting and photography attracted renewed attention in the 1970s....

Chinese-American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in the United States.

Born 1964, in Hong Kong.

Multimedia artist, curator, activist, writer.

Simon Leung immigrated to northern California from Hong Kong in 1974. He went on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1987 graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude. In 1988–1989, Leung participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Leung is a professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine. Leung’s work engages aesthetic form through socio-psychological and ethical practices, which mainly deal with issues of sexuality, border crossings, territories, and the ‘cosmopolitan nomad’; his long-term interest in displacement and desertion was expressed through filming the daily life of Warren Niesluchowski, a Polish immigrant to the United States. Since the early 1990s he has worked on a series of projects that consider the performative gesture of the squatting body, as a gesture of both occupation and resistance. Another topic that he has explored is the surfing communities in southern California and the lives of Vietnamese refugees who settled in the same area; this work formed part of a trilogy about the ‘residual space of the Vietnam War’. In ...

(b Yokohama, Japan, Oct 31, 1887; d Waterford, CT, Oct 11, 1966).

(). American writer. He taught English at Columbia University, New York, from 1919 to 1958, and became professor there in 1947. He devoted a lifetime’s research to tracing the origins of the legends of King Arthur, and to proving that they had their roots in Celtic mythology and were passed to the Continent by Breton and other story-tellers. Loomis also pursued an interest in art and art history; many of his early publications dealt with aspects of medieval Arthurian iconography, and it was this art-historical research that led him to postulate the Celtic origins of the legends. He continued, where relevant, to use his knowledge of medieval art to support his arguments. His Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (1938), written in collaboration with his wife, was a comprehensive survey of Arthurian iconography up to 1500, the result of nearly 30 years’ research. His continuing interest in art history is evident in ...

(b Seoul, July 20, 1932; d Miami, Jan 29, 2006).

South Korean video artist, performance artist, musician, sculptor, film maker, writer, and teacher, active in Germany and the USA (see fig.). From 1952 to 1956 he studied music and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. In 1956 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany: he studied music at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich, and worked with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt, before joining Fluxus, with whom he made performance art, experimental music, and ‘anti-films’ (e.g. the imageless Zen for Film, 1962). His Neo-Dada performances in Cologne during this period included a celebrated encounter with John Cage, during which he formed a lasting friendship with the avant-garde composer by cutting off his tie. Inspired by Cage’s ‘prepared piano’, in which the timbre of each note was altered by inserting various objects between the strings, Paik’s experiments from 1959 with television sets, in which the broadcast image was modified by magnets, culminated in his seminal exhibition ...

The final decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century witnessed an increasing propensity for artists to incorporate aspects of science in their own art. In many fields of scientific research—including the cloning of mammals, the genetic modification of crops, the creation of bioengineered organs and tissues, advances in nanotechnology and robotics, experimental research in how the human mind works and the study of artificial intelligence—the frontiers of knowledge pushed outward at an accelerated pace. In the spirit of creative inquiry, or in order to critique the goals and outcomes of scientific experimentation and application, artists regularly borrowed subjects, tools and approaches from science as a means to the production of art ( see fig. ).

In documenting and assessing the achievements of visual artists engaged with science, there was no broad consensus on the categorisation of artists’ work across the full range of activities, methods, motivations and use of materials. Assessments of artistic practice focused on artists’ work categorised by the traditional fields of science (e.g. artists who explore biology, artists who explore physical sciences). Other analyses of artistic practice focused on categories of art media (e.g. artists who use traditional means such as carving and casting to represent scientific discoveries, artists who explore and employ biological materials and scientific instruments)....

(b Urumqi, Nov 4, 1963).

Chinese architect and teacher. Wang Shu was born in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and studied at the Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University) in Jiangsu Province, receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture in 1985 and 1988 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. degree at the School of Architecture of Tongji University in Shanghai in 2000. Wang became a faculty member of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2000, and was named chair of the Architecture Department in 2003 and dean of the School of Architecture in 2007. In 2011 he was the Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

His first architectural commission, completed in 1990, was a youth centre in Haining, a small city near Hangzhou. In 1997 Wang and his architect wife, Lu Wenyu, established the Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou. The name of the firm suggested the couples’ non-professional approach based on everyday life, spontaneity, and experimentation. Both of them received relatively liberal educations in post-Mao China, and belonged to the generation of architects who advocated tectonic modernism combined with regionalism. Some of the built works designed by Wang and the firm are the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University (...

(b Jiangxi, China, July 14, 1920; d Greenbrae, CA, Dec 27, 2011).

American architect, teacher and writer. Born to American missionaries in China, Tyng graduated from Radcliffe College in 1942 and received her Masters of Architecture degree from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, in 1944. From 1947 to 1973 she worked with Louis Kahn and was closely involved in the design of many of his buildings, notably the Yale University Art Gallery. During this time she was also Associate Consultant Architect for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and Redevelopment Authority (1952–3) and for the Mill Creek Pennsylvania Redevelopment Plan. From 1968 she was an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; she also taught at several other colleges, and she practised architecture independently after 1973. In 1975 Tyng received a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Her highly theoretical research involved the interrelations between physical, natural, and psychic structures and their architectural application. Her dissertation discusses the mathematically based Fibonacci–Divine Proportion as a matrix, ‘linking unpredictable information bits in the brain … to precise proportional mean, or “essence”’. This she related to Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. An early independent building by Tyng, the Walworth Tyng House (...

[ Huei-Zu ]

(b Taipei, Taiwan, 1961; d New York, NY, Feb 8, 1997).

Taiwanese curator and art historian. Yang immigrated to the United States at age 15. She received a BA in Art History from Yale University in 1984 that included a six-month sabbatical to Jinan University in Guangzhou to study Chinese in 1982. Yang was exposed to art from a young age through her mother, Suhwa Chou Yang, who ran the Hunglin Art Gallery in Taipei in the 1970s. Upon graduation Yang held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art , both in New York, before accepting a position as Assistant Curator at the New Museum, New York, in 1988. Notable exhibitions she curated during her time at the New Museum include 1+1+1: Works by Alfredo Jaar (1992); Skin Deep (1993); and The Final Frontier (1993). She left the New Museum in 1993 to work as an independent curator and critic while studying to earn a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. In early ...