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Article

Asian American Arts Centre  

Matico Josephson

American multi-ethnic arts organization based in New York’s Chinatown. The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) and its predecessors, the Asian American Dance Theatre (1974–93) and the Asian Arts Institute (1981–8), emerged from the milieu of the Basement Workshop, the first working group of the Asian American Movement on the East Coast, whose mouthpiece was the journal Bridge (1970–81). After the closing of the Basement Workshop in 1987, the Dance Theatre and the Asian Arts Institute were consolidated as the AAAC.

Directed by Eleanor S. Yung, the Dance Theatre was at the core of the organization’s activities from the 1970s through the early 1990s, performing traditional dances from several Asian cultures alongside modern and postmodern forms. In the early 1980s, the Asian Arts Institute began to hold exhibitions and collect slides of artists’ work and documentation of their activities, working primarily with artists involved in the downtown art scene. Early programs included open studio events for artists working in Chinatown and exhibitions of the work of Arlan Huang (...

Article

Kōno Bairei  

Mark H. Sandler

[Shijun]

(b Kyoto, March 3, 1844; d Kyoto, February 20, 1895).

Japanese painter, book illustrator and art educator. Born the fourth son of Yasuda Shirobei, a Kyoto moneylender, the young Bairei was adopted into the Kōno family. In 1852 he began his artistic training under the Maruyama-school painter, Nakajima Raishō (1796–1871). After Raishō’s death, Bairei studied with the Shijō-school master Shiokawa Bunrin (1808–77). He also studied Chinese literature and calligraphy with Confucian scholars. In 1873 his talent was officially recognized when he was included among the painters selected to show at the second Kyoto Exhibition.

In 1878 he and the painter Mochizuki Gyokusen (1834–1913) successfully petitioned the governor of Kyoto Prefecture to establish the Kyoto Prefectural Painting School (Kyōto Fu Gagakkō) in 1880. Bairei was appointed instructor in the Kanō and Tōyō Sesshū styles of ink painting (suibokuga; see Japan §VI 4., (iii)), but in 1881 he resigned his post to open a private art academy. Among his students were ...

Article

Xu Beihong  

Ralph Croizier

revised by Stephanie Su

[Hsü Pei-hungJu Peon]

(b Yixing, Jiangsu Province, Jul 19, 1895; d Beijing, Sept 26, 1953).

Chinese painter and art educator. The most acclaimed Western-trained artist in modern China, he influenced the development of 20th-century Chinese painting through his role as art teacher and administrator as well as his painting. Xu Beihong studied painting as a child with his father, a village teacher and painter. After his father’s death, Xu moved to Shanghai, the cultural and commercial center of modern China, in 1915 to support his family. There he earned a living by painting popular pictures of beautiful women for Shenmei Shuguan (the Aesthetic Bookstore), a commercial art company founded by Gao Jianfu, and concurrently enrolled as a student in the French department of Zhendan University. In 1916 his painting of Changjie [Cangjie], the legendary inventor of Chinese characters, won first prize at an art contest of Changsheng Mingzhi University in Shanghai, earning him an invitation from the school founder to live at Hardoon Garden. There he became acquainted with prominent artistic and cultural intellectuals such as as ...

Article

China: Art education and training  

Mayching Kao

revised by Elaine Kwok

See also China.

In traditional China, training in painting and calligraphy was broadly distinct from training in other art forms, since for the scholar–official class, these two arts were important as part of a general cultural education and preparation for a professional career. Furthermore, from as early as the Six Dynasties period (222–589 ce), there was an emphasis on the aesthetic and expressive ideals of painting and calligraphy and the leading role of scholars, officials, and men of noble character in mainstream art. In the Northern Song period (960–1127 ce) Su Shi and his literati associates defined “scholars’ painting” (shiren hua), making a distinction not only between painting, together with calligraphy, and other arts, but also between the works of the literati and those of professionals and artisan–painters (see China: Court and literati painters). From the Yuan period (1279–1368) onward, literati ideals in art were dominant, giving rise to a dichotomy between the painting of scholar–amateurs and that of academic–professionals....

Article

Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club  

Anthony W. Lee

(Chinese Academy of Art)

Artists’ club formed in 1926 in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The club was composed of Guangdong immigrants in their late teens and early 20s. Its headquarters, which also served as a studio, teaching center, exhibition space and quite possibly a shared bedroom, was located in an upper room at 150 Wetmore Place, an alley on Chinatown’s western fringe. The exact membership is unknown—probably a dozen members at any given time—and its composition fluctuated greatly during its 15 or so years of existence. Its most famous members were Yun Gee, a co-founder and leader, and Eva Fong Chan (1897–1991), who was granted membership in the early 1930s and was the only woman known to belong. Unlike Fong, a former beauty queen who was a piano teacher married to a prominent Catholic businessman and privileged with an education, the young men were working-class and probably held the menial jobs reserved for most Chinese of their era, as servants, cooks, dishwashers and launderers....

Article

Huang Chün-pi  

Mayching Kao

revised by Fang-mei Chou

[Huang Junbi; zi Junweng; hao Baiyuntang]

(b Nanhai, Guangdong Province, Nov 12, 1898; d Taipei, Oct 29, 1991).

Chinese painter and art educator. Huang studied both Chinese and Western painting in his youth, but he came to concentrate on Chinese art, studying and copying the works of old masters in public and private collections, including his own. In his early days he excelled in emulating the style of Shixi, also known as Kuncan, and Shitao, also known as Daoji, both famous individualists in the early Qing. In 1921, through a recommendation from his Chinese art mentor Li Yaoping (1880–1938), he embarked upon an illustrious teaching career. He later held key positions in major art institutions, notably the National Central University from 1937 to 1948, and the National Normal University in Taipei, where he taught and served as Chairman for twenty years beginning in 1949. Huang, Zhang Daqian, and Pu Xinyu together were called the “Three Masters who Crossed the Strait” (duhai sanjia) for their achievements in promoting traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan after World War II. He maintained a lifelong friendship with Zhang Daqian, with whom he had traveled to Mt. Emei in Sichuan in 1939....

Article

Conder, Josiah  

Hiroyuki Suzuki

(b London, Sept 28, 1852; d Tokyo, 1920).

English architect, active in Japan. He was articled to Roger Thomas Smith and then entered the office of William Burges. In 1876 he was awarded the Soane Medallion by the RIBA. In the next year he was appointed the first professor of architecture at the Imperial College of Engineering (now Tokyo University) in Japan, in which role he taught every aspect of architecture and building construction. During this period he was also active as an architect, designing such buildings as the Tokyo Imperial Museum (1877–80; now Tokyo National Museum) and a national banqueting house, Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion), for the Ministry of Public Works. After leaving his academic and governmental posts, Conder went into private practice and designed many residences, including the Iwasaki residence in Kayacho (1896; see Japan, §III, 5), the Shimazu residence (1915) and the Furukawa residence (1917). His style gradually changed from Gothic to more classical. He is often called the father of Western architecture in Japan, not only on account of his designs but also because of his role in establishing the Western method of architectural higher ...

Article

Lin Fengmian  

Hsio-Yen Shih

[Lin Feng-mienLin Fengmin]

(b Mei xian, Guangdong Province, 1900; d 1991).

Chinese art educator and painter. His grandfather was a carver of tombstones, as was his father, who also learnt to paint. He began carving and painting as a child, often copying from the Jiezi yuan huazhuan (‘Mustard-seed Garden painting manual’; 1679 and 1701). He sold his first painting at the age of nine. In 1918 he moved to Shanghai, where he saw an advertisement for a work-study programme in France. That winter he began work in France as a signboard painter, after which he spent some months studying French at Fontainebleau and elsewhere. One school had a collection of plaster casts, which he began to draw in his spare time. In the spring of 1920 he entered the Dijon National Academy of Fine Arts and began to draw figures in charcoal. Within six months he had been recommended by the head of the school, a relief sculptor, to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also studied drawing and oil painting at the Cormon art studio in Paris and learnt much from the collections of the Louvre and the Musée Guimet. In ...

Article

Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco  

Nancy E. Green

[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 ...

Article

Godzilla: Asian American Art Network  

Alexandra Chang

American artists’ collective and support network formed in New York in 1990 by Ken Chu, Bing Lee and cultural critic, curator, and artist Margo Machida. The artists hoped to develop a network of artists and to document and build a discourse on Asian American art. The group disbanded in 2001.

The original members of the group included Tomie Arai, Ken Chu, Karin Higa, Arlan Huang (b 1948), Byron Kim, Colin Lee (b 1953), Bing Lee, Janet Lin, Mei-Lin Liu, Margo Machida, Stephanie Mar, Yong Soon Min, Helen Oji, Eugenie Tsai, and Garson Yu. This small group of artists, arts administrators and critics began by gathering in members’ apartments, but membership quickly grew to over 200 strong, which made it necessary for Godzilla’s meetings to be held in alternative art spaces throughout the city including Artists Space, The Drawing Center, and Art in General. Artists who later joined Godzilla included Allan deSouza (...

Article

Wu Guanzhong  

Melissa Walt

[Wu Kuan-chung]

(b Yixing, Jiangsu province, Aug 29, 1919; d Beijing, Jun 25, 2010).

Chinese painter and educator. Wu studied at the Hangzhou National Academy of Art from 1937 to 1942. There, he came under the influence of the school’s progressive director Lin Fengmian and teachers Pan Tianshou and Wu Dayu. From 1946 to 1950 Wu studied academic oil painting in Paris at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and in the studio of Jean Souverbie (1891–1981), but he was particularly drawn to the works of Post-Impressionist masters like van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Wu returned to China in 1950 and began to develop his modernist painting style and aesthetic ideas that were out of step with the prevailing political and cultural climate. Over the years he taught at a number of institutions, including the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution Wu performed hard labor and was prohibited from painting. In ...

Article

Liu Haisu  

Hsio-Yen Shih

revised by Sandy Ng

[Liu Hai-su; ming Pan; zi Jifang; hao Haiweng]

(b Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, 1896; d Shanghai, Aug 6, 1994).

Chinese art educator and painter. Liu Haisu came from a merchant family that had supported the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). He began to learn painting at the age of 6 by studying line drawings in the style of Yun Shouping. At the age of 13, he went to Shanghai to study Western painting but did not find any established art school. Instead he discovered the works of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, which he copied in order to learn Western oil and watercolor techniques. In 1912 he established the Shanghai Academy of Painting, predecessor of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, with Wu Shiguang and Zhang Yuguang (1885–1968). He was an active member of Tianmahui (The Heavenly Horse Society), a prominent art organization originated in Shanghai that promoted Western-style paintings, design, and photography through exhibitions and publications.

Liu was progressive about art education: he introduced mixed-sex education, started a summer school and correspondence courses in art, instituted public exhibitions of works by members of the academy, and took students on excursions to learn outdoor sketching. In ...

Article

Japan: Art training and education  

David Waterhouse

See also Japan

The concept of art education is of Western origin and can be applied in the Japanese context only from the last quarter of the 19th century. Before then, Japan was a pre-industrial society, in which artistic skill was handed down through elaborate networks of teachers, families (ke; literally ‘houses’) and lineages (ha). In general, the relation between teacher (shishō) and disciple (deshi) was extremely close, and the regime imposed on the latter could be demanding, particularly for an uchi-deshi (‘inner disciple’), who lived in the master’s house. Treated as a member of the family, often he ended by becoming son in law, through marriage or adoption. Details of the system varied according to period, place, social stratum and art form. As in China, fairly sharp distinctions can be made between the work and training of professional artists and those of amateurs, and similarly between lay artists and those belonging to one of the orders of Buddhism. Details of the training that Japanese artists received before the 19th century are often unavailable but can to some extent be inferred from our knowledge of the changing social situation. Traditional biographies of artists commonly list the names of teachers, if these cannot be deduced from the artistic names (...

Article

Japan: Art treatises  

Kendall Brown

Japanese art treatises can be divided roughly into theoretical and practical works, although some treatises fit into both categories. Although the distinction is often a fine one, treatises may be defined as different from catalogues of art collections or even writings on connoisseurship (see Japan: Connoisseurship and historiography). Although they are fewer in number than Chinese texts and lack their great age, Japanese treatises nonetheless offer a glimpse into the attitudes of artists and the values attributed to the art they produced. Because many specific treatises are discussed elsewhere in this dictionary in the context of Japanese artistic forms, schools or artists, this article elucidates some of the fundamental principles of Japanese art treatises, while also surveying some of the better-known writings from a range of artistic disciplines.

See also Japan

Treatises were written in virtually every field of artistic endeavour, ranging from Maegawa Kyoshūs authoritative Keiko inshi...

Article

Kawabata Gyokushō  

Katharina Rode

[Kawabata TakinoskueKeiteiShoo]

(b Kyoto, Mar 8, 1842; d Tokyo, Feb 14, 1913).

Japanese painter, educator, and designer. Born in Kyoto to the gold lacquer master Kawabata Kinsa (Sahei; 1818–1896), he was first apprenticed to the Mitsui family of wholesalers, where the seventh-generation head of the Izumi-Koishikawa branch of the Mitsui family, Mitsui Takayoshi (1823–1894), allegedly recognized his talent (Okamura 1911). In 1852, Takayoshi arranged for the eleven-year-old Kawabata to study with the painter Nakajima Raishō (1796–1871). Additionally, Kawabata frequented the studio of the literati painter Oda Kaisen (1785–1862) for lectures. Around 1866, Kawabata left for Tokyo, where he studied oil painting with Takahashi Yuichi and the British caricaturist Charles Wirgman (1832–1891).

After winning bronze medals at the Domestic Painting Competition (Naikoku Kaiga Kyōshinkai) in 1882 and 1884, Kawabata established himself as a painter in Tokyo. From 1889 Okakura Kakuzō employed him as professor at the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (Tokyo School of Fine Arts ), a position in which he stayed until his retirement in ...

Article

Korea: Art training and education  

Henrik H. Sørensen and Song-mi Yi

For many centuries artists were hardly distinguished from artisans, and their training was largely in the skills required (see Korea: History, culture, and patronage). Attitudes changed with the rise of amateur scholar-painters. The introduction of Western concepts of art in the 20th century encouraged a more formal approach to training.

See also Korea

Until the early 20th century, traditional art training in Korea was administered by government offices affiliated to the Board of Rites. The Unified Silla dynasty (ad 668–918) had an office called the Ch’aejŏn (Office of Painting), while the Koryŏ dynasty (ad 918–1392) had the Tohwawŏn (Academy of Painting) and the Hwaguk (Bureau of Painting). Artisans and painters were recruited and trained by these offices, which were responsible for supplying works of art to the royal palaces. However, the structure of these offices and their educational programmes are not known.

During the Chosŏn period (...

Article

Li Kuchan  

Mayching Kao

[K’u-ch’an]

(b Gaotang County, Shandong Province, Jan 11, 1899; d Beijing, June 11, 1983).

Chinese painter, calligrapher and art educator. Coming from a poor peasant family, Li took up hard labour to earn his way through art school in Beijing. He also studied with Xu Beihong and Qi Baishi; the latter considered Li his best student. Li was active as an art teacher in Beijing from 1926, notably at the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 1949 until his death in 1983. He specialized in bird-and-flower painting in the free and spontaneous xieyi (‘sketching the idea’) style that captures the spirit of the subjects through expressive calligraphic brushwork and simplified forms. He was known for his depiction of birds of prey throughout his career, but the works of his later years are particularly free and bold. The phrase ‘Pan of the south and Li of the north’ was coined in recognition of the similarity of Li’s style with that of Pan Tianshou.

Huaniao renwu bufen...

Article

Kuroda, Seiki  

Aya Louisa McDonald

[Kuroda, Kiyoteru; Seiki]

(b Kagoshima Prefect., June 29, 1866; d Tokyo, July 15, 1924).

Japanese painter. He is best known for introducing the plein-air palette of French Impressionism to Japan. He was the most successful and politically influential advocate of Western-style painting (Yōga; see Japan §VI 5., (iv)) in Japan at the turn of the century. Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, Kuroda was adopted by his uncle Viscount Kuroda Kiyotsuna (1830–1917) and educated in French and English in preparation for a career in the Foreign Service. In his teens he studied pencil sketching and watercolours under Hosoda Shūji (fl 19th century), a minor follower of the Western-style painter Takahashi Yūichi.

In 1884 Kuroda was sent to Paris to prepare for a career in law. It was then that his interest in art was reawakened, not only by the city of Paris itself but also by his contact and friendship with other Japanese such as Fuji Masazō (...

Article

Obata, Chiura  

Miwako Tezuka

(b Okayama prefecture, Japan, Nov 18, 1885; d California, Oct 6, 1975).

Japanese-born American painter. Obata is known for his sumi ink paintings, watercolors and woodblock prints depicting California landscapes. After studying Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at the Japan Fine Arts Academy in Tokyo, he moved to San Francisco in 1903 to pursue career in art, and soon began working as an illustrator for local publications for the Japanese American community. In 1921, when ethnic prejudice was still rampant, he co-founded the East West Art Society in San Francisco to foster multicultural communication through art. In 1928, he returned to Japan where he produced award-winning series of 35 woodblock prints of majestic landscapes of Yosemite, based on his extensive survey and sketches of the region in the previous year.

From 1932, Obata taught at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, but his career came to a halt with the outbreak of World War II, when he and his family were interned at Tanforan in San Bruno, CA, from ...

Article

Okakura, Tenshin  

Yoshikazu Iwasaki

[Kakuzō]

(b Yokohama, Dec 26, 1863; d Niigata Prefect., Sept 2, 1913).

Japanese administrator, art historian and teacher. In 1880 he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and entered the Ministry of Education. He later moved from administration to art education, and in 1886–7 he visited Europe and America as a member of an official art research team. In 1890, after his return, he became the head of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he worked to make way for a new Japanese style of painting (Nihonga), which introduced the realistic techniques of Western painting to traditional methods (see Japan §VI 5., (iii)). Okakura was a formative influence on many artists at the centre of the modern Nihonga movement, such as Taikan Yokoyama and Shunsō Hishida. In 1898 he resigned as head of the school because of internal disagreements and formed the unofficial artistic group the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin). In 1904 he became adviser to the East Asian department at the Boston, MA, Museum of Fine Arts, later becoming head of the department....