A Contemporary Record of Photography

For Fall 2009, China Institute Gallery has selected one hundred works from the groundbreaking collection of documentary photography at the Guangdong Museum of Fine Arts in Guangzhou. This exhibition, Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography, features modern masterpieces produced by Chinese photographers between 1951 and 2003. These images express an extraordinary range of human emotions and activities in dramatically different settings – urban and rural, public and private – and are of a high aesthetic order.

子曰﹕學而時習之，不亦說乎？

Zǐ yuē, “xué ér shí xí zhī, bù yì yuè hū?”

The Master said, ‘Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals?’ (The Analects, I.1)

One would be hard pressed to identify a more readily recognizable figure in Chinese history than Confucius—his ideas, as transmitted in the Analects and some other documents and then later elaborated upon by other philosophers (such as Mencius and Xunzi), have profoundly shaped Chinese civilization and culture. Given his imposing stature in Chinese history, it is somewhat ironic how little verifiable information is actually known to historians and scholars about the historical Confucius; much of what is commonly presumed about Confucius in the public imagination is distorted by centuries of accumulated legend, veneration, and iconography. The spring 2010 China Institute exhibition, Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art, assembles a collection of visual representations of Confucius informed by such veneration as well as presenting objects related to the state cult that grew up around him. These exhibition-related web pages are designed to give audiences a brief introduction to five different thematic approaches to studying Confucius in order to help answer some essential questions:

· What do we know about Confucius, the man?

· What was the social and political context that shaped him and that his ideas respond to?

· What did he do in life, and how has that subsequently been recorded, appreciated, and criticized in art and literature?

The name “Confucius” is a Latinization of Kongfuzi (孔夫子), or “Master Kong.”  His given name is Qiu Zhongni (邱仲尼) and he lived in the small state of Lu between 551-479 BCE (the area of Lu is in today’s province of Shandong).  What in the west goes by the name “Confucianism” is really a doctrinal tradition that in Chinese is called “rujia” (儒家) or “rujiao” (儒教), the school or tradition of scholars.  Confucius was a scholar who studied the past in order to find meanings for promoting social harmony in a society increasingly fractured by warfare and factionalism.

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September 16-December 12, 2010

Though China has had a long history in woodcuts and printing, the western woodcut, printed with oil-based ink, was adapted in the early 20th century by Chinese artists searching for a simplified pictorial language that would resonate with the illiterate masses. They not only created the beginnings of communist art in China, but laid the foundation of modern Chinese art in the most general sense. While past scholarly publications and survey exhibitions have familiarized wider audiences with aspects of the modern Chinese woodcut movement, this exhibition is the first in the U.S. to present a comprehensive overview of the beginnings and development of this important art form during the modern period of Chinese history from the 1930s to the present. Woodcuts in Modern China is organized by the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University.

February-June, 2011

Uncover the mysterious story of the middle bank of the Yangzi River, one of the most significant cradles of Chinese civilization and a historical area for study of Chinese bronze culture. Several important excavations in the past few decades have enabled us to examine the undeveloped aspects of this culture through exquisite bronze vessels from the Hunan Provincial Museum. This exhibition will explore regional culture along the Yangzi River in three parts: the development and characteristics of regional bronzes, their function and patronage, and their cultural connection to Central China.

This is an original exhibition organized by China Institute Gallery in collaboration with the Hunan Provincial Museum accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by China Institute Gallery. It is directed by Willow Hai Chang, Director of China Institute Gallery, and co-curated by Chen Jianming, Director of the Hunan Provincial Museum, Jay Xu, Director of Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and Fu Juliang, Curator of Bronze Collections, Hunan Provincial Museum.