Ju was the Fire, Always Burning

March 21, 2012

Ju was “The Fire, Always Burning’

Ju Was 'The Fire, Always Burning' Published as part of the March 21, 2012 edition.

BY KIT HUFFMAN World-renowned Chinese brush artist and teacher I-Hsiung Ju, 88, died Saturday, March 17, 2012, at his home in North Fort Myers, Fla., after a short illness.

He was professor of art and artistin- residence emeritus at Washington and Lee University, founder of the former Art Farm gallery and apprenticeship program just north of Lexington, and a lifelong promoter of Chinese painting and culture around the world.

“He was my master, I was his student, and in the last years, I thought of him as my second father,” said Michael Kopald, a Lexington artist who first came to know Ju as an art student at W&L and who, shortly after graduation, worked and studied for four years at the Art Farm.

“He was truly a teacher: he wanted to teach you what you wanted to learn,” Kopald explained. “He liked to say he was the fire, always burning, and all you had to do was come close.”

Ju was born in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, China, and, at 15, joined the guerilla resistance against the Japanese Army. As a student of art at the wartime campus of Xiamen University, he put on exhibitions of paintings, created theatrical productions, and published poetry and woodcuts.

After graduation, he followed his Xiamen sweetheart, Chow Soon Chuang, to the Philippines, where they married in 1947. There, the couple taught school and received their master’s degrees at Santo Tomas University. Ju worked hard to promote Filipino/Chinese cultural exchange, organizing study tours to Taiwan and helping Taiwan artists to exhibit in the Philippines.

In 1968 he moved with his family to the United States at the invitation of the University of Connecticut and became a visiting professor at four New England state universities. He joined the W&L faculty as artist-in-residence in 1969, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1973. While at W&L, he was instrumental in developing East Asian studies, including the Art in Taiwan program that took W&L students abroad for study every other year.

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March 21, 2012

Ju was “The Fire, Always Burning’

In 1975, he and his wife established the Art Farm, a seven acre property with two buildings off Va. 39, to teach Chinese calligraphy and brush painting, culinary arts, flower arrangement and other aspects of Chinese culture.

“We will remember Professor Ju not only as a talented artist of international renown, but also as an extremely popular member of the W&L faculty and of the Lexington community for three decades,” said W&L President Ken Ruscio.

He retired from the faculty in 1989 but continued operating the Art Farm Gallery until 1999. He relocated his studio to Princeton, N.J., in 2002.

In addition to taking groups of students to China, he was in frequent demand around the country to lecture and exhibit his paintings of flowers, birds and landscapes. Many of his Lexington friends were able to reconnect with him last October, when he returned to W&L for a Staniar Gallery exhibition, entitled “Journey Home.” In January, he gave a workshop to the Sarasota Sumi-e Society, teaching until shortly before he became ill.

Rockbridge artist Virginia Lloyd-Davies recalled in an email that she and her husband, Dennis De Vito, came to the area in 1986 so that she could begin studying with Ju. “As a teacher, he was beyond compare: kind, patient, enthusiastic, encouraging and always full of fun,” she said. “Whenever I am stressed, I listen to his voice in my head saying, ‘You’re doing fine!’ I repeated those words back to him in the hours leading up to his death, and he smiled in appreciation.”

She recalled that Professor and Mrs. Ju attended one of her first music and painting events, which was staged at W&L’s Moot Court in 1998. Josh Harvey improvised on the keyboard while she improvised in Chinese Brush style.

“Watching Professor Ju for all those years taught me how to allow the brush to dance,” she said. “He would often say, ‘I don’t paint, I just wave my hands above the paper!’ And indeed it always seemed like magic when flowers, birds and landscapes would materialize on the paper at his invitation.”

Lloyd-Davies and Kopald both participated in many of the trips organized by Ju to Taiwan and China. For Kopald, the first was a six-week trip in 1974 to Taiwan, where Ju arranged for the small group to receive art lessons, which were given in the basement of the history museum.

“I became a convert, from the first time I picked up a brush,” said Kopald, remembering his exposure to the freeflowing style of Chinese brushwork. “There was something almost familiar to me that struck me very deeply.”

The young art student returned to Lexington in early 1975 to audit Ju’s spring course in Chinese painting.

That was also the year that Ju bought the Art Farm, and Kopald moved in. “His dream was to create what the Chinese call ‘a book garden,’ a tradition where apprentices come to work and study with a master,” Kopald explained. Other inaugural Art Farm students were Steven Roberts, David Hilton and Page 2 of 3

March 21, 2012

Ju was “The Fire, Always Burning’

Missy and Juen Morgan. Later students included W&L students Phil Welsh and Jeff Shumate, both now living in Rockbridge.

In 2010, Kopald took a last trip to China with Ju, visiting the area he’d lived in as a child. His village was no longer there, however, having been burned to the ground by the Japanese during World War II. “Professor Ju was the most gentle, loving person that I’ve ever known,” said Kopald. “He had a lot of reasons to be bitter and underwent hardships we can’t imagine, poverty, injury, death of family and friends, but he came through them loving people even more. There are only a handful of people who are a loving kind of person after such hardship.”

He is survived by his wife, Chow-Soon Chuang; four daughters, Doris Ju, Helen Ju, Jane Ju and Grace Ju; and three grandchildren.

The funeral will be held Friday, March 23, at 5 p.m. at the Fuller Metz Funeral Home in Cape Coral, Fla. Messages of condolence may be sent to his widow, Chow Soon, and the family at 18165 Sandy Pines Circle, N. Fort Myers, FL 33917.

A memorial service will be held on July 7 in Princeton, N.J.

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