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Article

Addis, Sir John M(ansfield)  

Margaret Medley

(b London, June 11, 1914; d Pembury, Kent, July 31, 1983).

English diplomat, collector and art historian. In 1947, as a member of the British Diplomatic Service, he was posted to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, then the capital of the Nationalist Chinese government. He became interested in Chinese art and history and began a collection of porcelain, furniture and textiles at a time of political and economic uncertainty, when Chinese collectors were forced to sell. When he moved to the British embassy in Beijing in 1954 he continued his research into Chinese ceramic history with the help of specialists from the Palace Museum. In 1963 he became British ambassador to the Philippines and was largely responsible for organizing the Manila Trade Pottery Seminar (1968), to which he also contributed five of the nine discussion monographs. From 1972 to 1974, as British ambassador to China, he played an important part in promoting the Chinese archaeological exhibition The Genius of China, held in London at the Royal Academy in ...

Article

Aida, Takefumi  

Michael Spens

(b Tokyo, June 5, 1937).

Japanese architect, teacher and writer. He graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1960 and obtained his MArch in 1966 and DEng in 1971. He began teaching architecture at Shibaura Institute of Technology in 1962, becoming a lecturer in engineering there in 1966 and subsequently assistant professor (1973) and professor (1976). In 1967 he opened his own office in Tokyo. A founding member of the counter-Metabolist group Architext (1971), Aida was one of the New Wave of avant-garde Japanese architects, expressing his theories in both buildings and writings. His journal articles clearly state his desire to question—if not overthrow—orthodox Modernist ideas of rationality, order and suitability of form to function. He likened architectural design to an intellectual game, and he was one of the first to equate deconstruction with the art of construction, for example in his Artist’s House (1967), Kunitachi, Tokyo, in which all the elements have arbitrary relationships with each other. In other buildings he focused on the creation of architectural experiences that reflect immediate events. In the Nirvana House (...

Article

Alexander, William  

Patrick Conner

(b Maidstone, Kent, April 10, 1767; d Maidstone, July 23, 1816).

English painter, engraver, draughtsman and museum official. The son of a coachbuilder, he was apprenticed to Julius Caesar Ibbetson before enrolling in 1784 at the Royal Academy Schools, London. In 1792 he accepted the post (previously declined by Ibbetson) of draughtsman to George, 1st Earl Macartney, on his embassy to China. As the embassy returned by inland waterway from Beijing to Canton, Alexander made detailed sketches of the Chinese hinterland—something achieved by no British artist previously and by very few subsequently. These sketches formed the basis for finished watercolours (e.g. Ping-tze Muen, the Western Gate of Peking, 1799; London, BM) and for numerous engravings by both himself and others. For over fifty years his images of China were widely borrowed by book illustrators and by interior decorators in search of exotic themes.

Alexander was also a keen student of British medieval antiquities, undertaking several tours in order to make drawings of churches and monuments; many of these were reproduced in the antiquarian publications of ...

Article

Arai, Alberto T.  

Kathryn O’Rourke

(b Mexico City, Mar 29, 1915; d Mexico City, May 25, 1959).

Mexican architect and theorist. He received a degree in architecture at the Escuela Nacional de Arquitectura (ENA) at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM) in 1940, and studied urbanism at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in 1941–1942. In 1954 he received a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters at UNAM. Arai built relatively few buildings, but he was one of Mexico’s foremost theorists of architectural modernism. Early in his career he embraced the principles associated with the formally austere, politically engaged architecture that dominated Mexico City in the 1930s; later he became fascinated by the architecture of indigenous Mexico and its lessons for modern architects. Arai’s intellectualism distinguished him from many of his colleagues and his study of history and philosophy shaped his sophisticated writings on architecture, urbanism, and indigenous art.

Arai had a distinguished teaching career with appointments in multiple fields and at several institutions. He was professor of architectural theory at ENA from ...

Article

Ardizzone, Edward  

Alan Powers

(Irving Jeffrey)

(b Haiphong, French Indo-China [now Vietnam], Oct 16, 1900; d Rodmersham, Kent, Nov 8, 1979).

English illustrator and author. From 1905 he grew up in England, becoming a professional artist in 1926 after part-time study at the Westminster School of Art, London. He became known as an illustrator of genre scenes in a variety of media, often with a comic Victorian flavour. He was best known for illustrated stories, the first of which, Little Tim and the Brave Sea-captain (Oxford, 1936), was followed by numerous imaginative and popular children’s books and by many other illustrated books. Baggage to the Enemy (London, 1941) reflected his appointment in 1940 as an Official War Artist, recording the German invasion of France, and the North African and Italian campaigns. His freelance career continued after the war with a steady production of illustrative and ephemeral work in an instantly recognizable style that relied on ink line and delicate washes.

The Young Ardizzone: An Autobiographical Fragment (London, 1970) Diary of a War Artist...

Article

Ashihara, Yoshinobu  

Toshiaki Nagaya

(b Tokyo, July 7, 1918).

Japanese architect and writer . He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1942 and in 1946–7 he worked in the office of Junzō Sakakura in Tokyo. After receiving a master’s degree from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1953), he worked in the office of Marcel Breuer in New York (1953–6). In 1956 he returned to Japan and opened his own office in Tokyo. One of Ashihara’s principal concerns was the use of logical structural systems to create flexible, integrated space within buildings. He developed the use of split levels or ‘skip’ floors to combine spaces of various sizes, as in the Chūō Koron building (1956), Tokyo, for which he was awarded the Architectural Institute of Japan prize in 1960. The Sony building (1966), Tokyo, was designed as a cubic spiral of skip floors, creating organic spatial continuity throughout the building with spaces that interrelate with each other and with their environment. A similar concept was used for the Japanese pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal, for which he received an award from the Ministry of Education. The continuity and flow of space between interior and exterior, and in the spaces between buildings, were also addressed, for example in the Komazawa Olympic Gymnasium (...

Article

Azuma, Takamitsu  

Toshiaki Nagaya

(b Osaka, Sept 20, 1933).

Japanese architect and writer . After graduating in 1957 from the School of Architecture, Osaka University, he worked for three years as a designer for the Ministry of Postal Services in Tokyo and Osaka and then joined Junzō Sakakura Architect & Associates (1960–67). He established his own office in Tokyo in 1967. Azuma’s architecture is characterized by the expression of opposing elements such as individuality and collectivity, enclosure and openness, inside and outside etc. For example, his own house, Tower House (1967), Tokyo, expresses the idea of defensive living in the modern urban setting. Standing on a tiny plot of land in the heart of the city, it has a closed concrete exterior with no windows on the street elevation; this, however, is extended outwards to the city by a slanting parapet and overhanging roof-terrace acting as transitional elements between inside and out. Inside is an ingenious sequence of spaces expressing individuality in an area of traditionally designed houses. A prolific architect, Azuma produced designs with simple and clear-cut images: for instance, in the Seijin Nursery School (...

Article

Fu Baoshi  

Tamaki Maeda

[Fu Pao-shih; ming Fu Ruilin]

(b Xinyu, Jiangxi Province, Oct 5, 1904; d Nanjing, Sept 28, 1965).

Chinese painter, seal carver, and art historian. He was one of the foremost painters of guohua (literally “national painting”), who worked in the traditional medium of painting in East Asia, namely, ink and color on paper or silk. His work helped transform literati painting, an age-old artistic pursuit of the elite scholarly class, to an idiom of expression in tune with the aesthetic and social values of modern era.

Born into a humble family, Fu received a modest education in Nanchang. He later studied at the Imperial School of Fine Arts in Japan, and in 1935 became a faculty member at the National Central University in Nanjing. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Fu fled to the hinterland, where he developed his mature style of painting—semi-abstract landscapes often combined with human elements—and earned considerable repute through exhibitions and publications. After the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Fu produced paintings inspired by poems by Mao Zedong and the Red Army, as well as those emphasizing the beauty of the land in China. He continued to serve in important positions in the art world, most notably, director of the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute....

Article

Basho  

Japanese, 17th century, male.

Born 1644, in Iga; died 1694.

Painter, poet.

Basho is one of Japan’s most celebrated haiku poets. He also studied suiboku painting (ink painting) with Marikawa Kyoroku.

Article

Okada Beisanjin  

Betty Iverson Monroe

(b Osaka, 1744; d Osaka, 1820).

Japanese painter, calligrapher and poet. He was probably self-taught, benefiting from the discussions, demonstrations and exhibitions of literati painting at the homes of Osaka patrons such as Kimura Kenkadō, and from the company of literati artists such as Uragami Gyokudō and Tanomura Chikuden. Said to have been generous and ebullient, Beisanjin also became a respected bibliophile, collector and teacher.

Beisanjin’s style, heavy and blunt at first, became freer as he gained assurance, as in the hanging scroll Silent Temple in the Autumn Mountains (1807; Hyōgo, I. Matsushita priv. col., see Koyama). Around 1809 he retired from his official position in Osaka and moved to a place near by. His family continued to operate the grain business in the Tenma area, which provided the income that enabled him to collect paintings, calligraphy and books. He is recorded as emulating such Chinese literati artists as Mi Fu, the Yuan-period (1279–1368...

Article

Bing, S(iegfried)  

Gabriel P. Weisberg

(b Hamburg, Feb 26, 1838; d Vaucresson, nr Paris, Sept 6, 1905).

French art dealer, critic and patron, of German birth. Often misnamed Samuel, he was a major promoter of Japanese art and Art Nouveau. From a wealthy, entrepreneurial Hamburg family, he trained as an industrial decorator for ceramics under the guidance of his father and independently in Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70). After the Franco-Prussian War (which he spent in Belgium) Bing established a thriving Oriental trading business, primarily of Japanese arts, the success of which permitted the opening of his Oriental crafts shop in Paris in the late 1870s. Following a trip to Japan, he expanded the business in the 1880s, selling both contemporary and ancient Japanese objects, to meet the demand for Oriental merchandise. At the end of the 1880s, as Japonisme developed, Bing founded a monthly periodical, Le Japon artistique (pubd simultaneously in Eng., Fr. and Ger., 1888–91), and organized a series of exhibitions of rare Japanese art, featuring ceramics and ...

Article

Bo Erdu  

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Active in the second half of the 17th century.

Painter, poet.

Bo Erdu was a Manchu and a friend of the painter Shitao.

Article

Gyokuen Bonpō  

Masatomo Kawai

[Gyokukei]

(1348–c. 1420).

Japanese Zen monk, scholar, calligrapher, poet and painter. He began his training as a monk at Nanzenji in Kyoto, under Shun’oku Myōha, the nephew and disciple of Musō Sōseki, one of the leading Zen prelates of the Muromachi period (1333–1568). His other teachers included the Zen recluse Shakushitsu Genkō and Gidō Shūshin, under whom he studied literature. A trusted adviser of the fourth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimochi, Gyokuen was appointed to the prestigious abbacies of Kenninji (c. 1409) and Nanzenji (1413) in Kyoto. His true wish, however, was to retire from the world, and in 1420, after a disagreement with Yoshimochi, he left Kyoto to lead a life of seclusion. An accomplished poet, Gyokuen also brushed colophons on many shigajiku (poem-painting scrolls) of the period, including Josetsu’s Catching a Catfish with a Gourd (c. 1413–15; Kyoto, Myōshinji). His own painting, which shows the influence of the mid-14th-century Chinese priest–painter Xue Chuang and of Tesshū Tokusai, strongly reflects his literary disposition. He is especially well known for his subdued monochrome ink paintings of orchids (emblems of moral virtue), 30 of which have survived (...

Article

Kameda Bōsai  

Stephen Addiss

[Kameda Chōkō; Kameda Hōsai]

(b Edo [now Tokyo], 1752; d Edo, 1826).

Japanese painter, poet, calligrapher and book illustrator. The son of an Edo merchant, he studied calligraphy from a very early age under the noted Chinese-style calligrapher Mitsui Shinna (1700–82). He also received a Confucian education, unusual at that time for a merchant’s son. From about 1765 to 1774 Bōsai trained under Inoue Kinga (1732–84), an influential Confucian scholar of eclectic doctrines as well as a painter and calligrapher, at the Seijūkan, a private academy near Yokohama. Bōsai opened a Confucian academy in Edo in 1774. In 1790, however, the Tokugawa shogunate issued an edict aimed at curtailing the popularity of such schools as Bōsai’s, where students were encouraged to develop their own moral philosophy rather than accept the government-sponsored Confucianism of the Chinese Song-period (ad 960–1279) philosopher Zhu Xi. Bōsai gradually lost his pupils and in 1797 closed his school.

Bōsai’s artistic activity increased from ...

Article

Brankston, A(rchibald) D(ooley)  

Margaret Medley

(b Shanghai, Dec 18, 1909; d Hong Kong, Jan 1941).

English art historian. Fluent in Chinese, he was employed as a civil engineer in China from 1933 to 1934. He then helped with cataloguing, photographing and arranging the exhibits for the International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy in London (1935–6; see China: Archaeology). This was followed during the next 18 months by visits to Beijing and Jingdezhen as a Universities China Committee Scholar to study Chinese ceramics. He returned to London in 1938 and became assistant keeper in the Department of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum. In July 1940 he moved to Hong Kong to enter government service, where he died in 1941. He is best remembered for his pioneering work on Ming ceramics, Early Ming Wares of Ching-tê-chên.

Early Ming Wares of Ching-tê-chên (Beijing, 1938/R Hong Kong, 1970)‘Yüeh Ware of the “Nine Rocks” Kiln’, Burlington Magazine, 73 (1938), pp. 257–62‘Descriptions of Specimens’, ...

Article

Bushell, Stephen Wooton  

Margaret Medley

(b Ash, Kent, July 28, 1844; d London, Dec 18, 1908).

English art historian. Trained in medicine, he became interested in the history of Chinese ceramics during his years as physician to the British embassy in Beijing (1868–1900). In 1891 he drafted a translation (pubd 1910) of Zhu Yan’s Tao shuo (‘Description of Chinese pottery and porcelain’, 1774), the first comprehensive account of Chinese ceramics written for connoisseurs by a Chinese critic. Bushell’s greatest achievement was his catalogue of the William T. Walters Collection in Baltimore, sumptuously published in ten folio volumes in 1896; its text, published as a single volume in 1899, is the earliest systematic study in English of Chinese ceramics in which the subject is treated chronologically and in which particular aspects such as reign marks, forms, technical matters and decorative motifs are considered separately. Bushell also translated a handwritten copy of Xiang Yuanbian’s Lidai mingci tupu (‘Illustrated description of the celebrated porcelain of different dynasties’, ...

Article

Yosa Buson  

Hollis Goodall-Cristante

[BusonSha’inShunseiTaniguchi NoriyukiYahantei]

(b Kema, Osaka, 1716; d Kyoto, 1783).

Japanese painter and poet. He was a member of the second generation of literati painters in Japan. He and his contemporary Ike Taiga (see Ike Taiga) absorbed and transformed the Chinese scholar–amateur style into a Japanese idiom (Nanga or Bunjinga; see Japan §VI 4., (vi), (d)).

Buson left Kema in 1735 for Edo (now Tokyo), where he studied haiku poetry under Uchida Senzan and, from 1737, under Hayano Hajin (1677–1742). His earliest known work was an illustration of a woman reading a letter (1737; see Suzuki, p. 157) for a haiku anthology. When Hajin died, Buson left Edo and for the next ten years he lived and travelled in the northern Shimosa–Kantō provinces (now Ibaraki Prefect.), concentrating on the study of haiku but supporting himself by painting. His works of this period were experimental, drawing both on the style of the Kanō school...

Article

Cha Jizuo  

Chinese, 17th century, male.

Born 1601, in Haining (Zhejiang); died 1677.

Painter, historian.

Cha Jizuo was an historian who also painted landscapes in the style of Huang Gongwang.

Article

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung  

Joan Kee

(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....

Article

Chuang Che  

Lesley Ma

[Zhuang Zhe]

(b Peking [now Beijing], Dec 12, 1934).

Taiwanese painter of Chinese birth, active also in the USA. Chuang Che was a son of Chuang Yen (1899–1980), the calligrapher, connoisseur, and chief custodian of the Chinese imperial art collection, who moved his family alongside the national treasures after the eruption of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, settling in Taiwan in 1948, and becoming the first deputy director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 1965. In 1958 Chuang Che graduated from the Art Department of what later became the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei and joined the Fifth Moon Group (Wuyue huahui), a leading modernist painting society in postwar Taiwan.

Chuang’s solid foundation in Chinese calligraphy and painting acquired through his upbringing prompted him to seek alternative ways to continue the legacy. In his early career, he made expressionist, mostly abstract, oil paintings, deliberately avoiding the familiar Chinese materials of ink and brush. Inspired by the abstract paintings of ...