Kaikodo Journal XXI Autumn 2001

TEN

Corresponding to the exhibition held between November 10 and December 10, 2001. 19 Contemporary Chinese paintings (19 color plates). Preface by Howard Rogers. 78 pages.
Includes the essays:
Claudia Brown:
    “Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twenty-First
    Century: An Appreciation”
Pauline Yao:
    “Traversing Tradition: Collecting Contemporary
    Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco”
C.C. Wang:
    “The Importance of Brushwork in Chinese
    Painting”
Arnold Chang:
    “Drawing on the Past    

The essays in this journal identify significant components of the cultural complex in which the present group of paintings had their genesis and have their being.  The first, by Dr. Claudia Brown, formerly Curator of Asian Art the Phoenix Art Museum and now Professor of Chinese Art-history at Arizona State University, provides a stimulating overview of the themes and issues of contemporary Chinese painting as viewed from the global perspective of the 21st century.  In the second essay, Pauline Yao, Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco at the time of the journal’s publication, reviews the issues of collecting modern and contemporary Chinese painting from an institutional perspective. The following two essays shift the critical perspective to a certain extant from that of outsider (art-historian/curator) to that of insider (artist). The artist-connoisseur-collector C.C. Wang upholds the primacy of brushwork as a criterion for excellence especially in literati paint, while Arnold Chang analyzes why an artists of the contemporary period might choose to paint in what we recognize as a traditional style.