From Shanghai to Ohio

INTRODUCTION

Hou-mei Sung

The initial idea of creating the exhibition From Shanghai to Ohio was conceived in the summer of 2014, when Wu Tien-hsing 吳天行 (1923–2018), a geotechnical engineering professor at The Ohio State University, donated 136 paintings by his late father, Woo Chong Yung (Wu Zhongxiong) 吳仲熊 (1898–1989), to the Cincinnati Art Museum. These paintings—combined with the much larger collection of Woo’s paintings, calligraphies, seals, photographs, and sword, which were previously donated to The Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University—not only provide a glimpse into his broader personal artistic development and career, but also create a context for the larger historical and cultural climate of twentieth-century China.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition, this catalogue features approximately one hundred paintings and objects drawn from the collections of both the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Frank Museum of Art. Almost all these works are dated and inscribed with Woo’s poems and comments revealing the long and inspirational path he traveled in the development of his artistic style. Woo’s migration to the United States not only led him to develop a unique sensitivity and appreciation for the art and culture of his homeland but also helped provide a completely new cultural identity, reshaping both his technical and spiritual artistic perspectives. Memories from the past, such as the seasonal blossoms and local scenes of Shanghai, continued to evoke strong emotions and inspire new representations in his art.

Using Woo’s chronologically ordered masterpieces, the essays in this catalogue explore Woo’s unique status in Chinese painting history and how his relocation from Shanghai to Ohio reshaped his identity and art. Julia F. Andrews focuses on Woo’s artistic career in Shanghai, where he lived for the first six decades of his life, as well as his work after he left China to create a new life as an Asian American artist in Columbus, Ohio. Kuiyi Shen discusses the Shanghai art world of the late nineteenth century through the 1950s, from which the artist Woo Chong Yung emerged. Hou-mei Sung highlights the symbolic language Woo created through his flower and bird motifs to convey his thoughts and feelings across his lifetime.

Like numerous early Asian immigrants, Woo experienced not only deeply buried longing and nostalgia for the hometown he left but also fading memories and transformative new experiences that gradually reshaped his personal and artistic identities.

A NOTE ON WOO’S NAME AND DATES

Woo’s official name in Chinese is 吳仲熊 . After migrating to the United States, his official name became Woo Chong Yung (simplified as C.Y. Woo). As is typical for immigrants, when Woo’s name is mentioned outside China, it can be pronounced or

Woo Chong Yung, A White Owl, 1987, ink and color on paper (cat. 46, detail)

The Many Worlds of Woo Chong Yung / C.Y. Woo (1898–1989)

Julia F. Andrews

In 1947, in what would prove to be the final years of the Republic of China on the Chinese mainland, art circles in Shanghai produced an ambitious compilation, The Yearbook of Chinese Art. Among the biographies of important contemporary artists, the yearbook records one for forty-nine-year-old Woo Chong Yung 吳仲熊 (fig. 1).1 He is listed as a guohua 國畫 painter, the term for an artist who worked in the traditional Chinese media of ink and water-based pigments on handmade local paper or silk. This term only came into use in the modern era when the introduction of oil paintings, pastels, and drawing made it necessary to distinguish what had always been called hua (painting) from yanghua 洋畫 (Western-style painting). For most artists of the early twentieth century, however, guohua, or Chinese painting, meant much more than the simple question of materials—it signified a rich tradition of brush techniques, compositions, and past masters. For Woo, mastery of such traditions was a lifetime dedication.

The biography records that his family was from Wuxing in Zhejiang province, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Shanghai, and that he excelled at the three arts of Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poetry.2 The present exhibition, From Shanghai to Ohio, comprising his work in all three art forms, confirms the accuracy of this claim. As a young man, Woo had already achieved notice in the art world for his landscape paintings and calligraphy. Gu Linshi 顧麟士 (1865–1930), the best-regarded landscape painter in the Suzhou literati tradition, and Wu Changshi 吳昌碩 (1844–1927), a fellow Zhejiang native and leading flower painter, were among his teachers, and inscriptions by these older artists testify to their appreciation of his talent. Woo simultaneously dedicated himself to bird-and-flower painting in the style of the brilliant Ren Yi 任頤 (1840–1895), whose work played a vital role in his artistic development.3

THE WOO FAMILY AND SHANGHAI SCHOOL PAINTING

Woo Chong Yung (who shortened his name to C.Y. Woo after settling in the United States) was raised in a prosperous, art-loving family. The family fortune had been established by his grandfather, Woo Saw-chin 吳少卿 (Wu Shaoqing, 1852–1910), who had moved to Shanghai at the age of sixteen to pursue a career as a merchant.4 In 1881 he entered the employ of the German firm Arnhold, Karberg & Company after it relocated its headquarters from Guangzhou to Shanghai,5 and by 1896 he had become chief comprador of the company.6 In 1894 Woo Saw-chin established a silkspinning business, which he eventually acquired as one of company’s subsidiaries.7 He also sat on the board of Shanghai’s only modern paper mill, which was founded in 1907 by the art-collecting industrialist Pang Yuanji 龐元濟 (1864–1949) to serve the

Fig. 1

The painter Woo Chong Yung at about age 49

Woo Chong Yung, Pavilion by Willows, 1932, hanging scroll, ink and color on paper (cat. 2, detail)

CATALOGUE

Hou-mei Sung, Julia F. Andrews, and Kuiyi Shen

Spring Streams and New Willows

1932 album leaf, ink on paper

33.4 × 24.6 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2011.07.357

In this beautifully balanced album leaf, Spring Streams and New Willows, Woo reorganizes Song and Yuan landscape styles into a crescentshaped composition. With a vast expanse of empty space unpopulated by human figures, he captures the loneliness characteristic of the Yuan master Ni Zan 倪瓚 (1301–1374), echoing his poem. Early spring willows receding along the zigzagging lakeshore and a wooden bridge in the foreground create a typical Jiangnan scene. This painting seems to have been made when Woo was traveling to his hometown. Instead of happiness at the arrival of the new season, he expresses loneliness at his separation from loved ones. Although the dry strokes applied here certainly refer to the Yuan masters, the willows may have been inspired by the Song artist Zhao Lingrang 趙令穰 (active late 11th–early 12th century; see cat. 2) and horizontal dots on the distant peaks evoke the brushwork of Mi Fu 米芾 (1051–1107). A seal in the lower right corner directly adopts a phrase from the much-admired calligraphic work Lantingji xu 蘭亭集序 (Preface to the Orchid Pavilion collection) written by Wang Xizhi 王羲之 in 353.

JA KS

Clearing after Spring Rain

1932 album leaf, ink on paper

33.5 × 24.1 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2015.02.10

This is a leaf from the same album as Spring Streams and New Willows (cat. 3). In Clearing after Spring Rain, Woo imagines the constricted sensation of a cottage at the bottom of a deep mountain valley. The blank paper behind the rustic dwelling, however, releases the pressure as the mist filters through the receding gorge. Woo writes that he paints to disperse the gloomy feelings caused by the rainy season. The composition would be recognized as a reference to the Yuan artist Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), but the emphasis on dry ink and the variety of texture strokes for the trees is synthesized from many other early masters. This variation in composition and brushwork from one leaf to the next adds visual and expressive interest to the album. Woo envisions a scene that is compelling in its own right, but he paints in a style that can also be appreciated by viewers who seek classical traces. By this time, Woo Chong Yung had reached his own mature style of literati landscape.

JA KS

Portrait of a Lady

1951 hanging scroll, ink and color on paper 45.3 × 31 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by Lois D. Augur

90.37

A surreal image, Portrait of a Lady depicts a beautiful lady floating amidst blossoming plums, expressing Woo’s deep love and desire for his absent wife, from whom he was separated after the Communist takeover of Shanghai. In the inscription at left, he makes a point of recording that he painted the work in her studio, the Yingyingxuan (Studio of Ying Mei).

In the second inscription, at right, Woo explains more specifically his loneliness and longing. He describes quite vividly a strange experience two days earlier, on December 19. While listening to the sound of wind chimes he suddenly lost consciousness, and when he woke up he felt as though his soul was inexplicably wandering around outside his body. He was sorrowful that in the human world there was no place to bury his worries, and even his soul dream-wandering in a Daoist paradise could not find the path forward.

JA KS

Two Roosters

1952 hanging scroll, ink and color on paper 41.7 × 31 cm

Cincinnati Art Museum

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2015.317

In Two Roosters, Woo revisits his early Shanghai school style. The brushwork perfectly reflects the foundations of his painting vocabulary in the art of Ren Yi 任頤 (1840–1895). At the time, in this early, optimistic period of the newly established People’s Republic of China, the crowing of the rooster at dawn was seen as a hopeful sign of the potential of the newly united country. It was a very popular subject at the time and many Chinese artists took it as a symbol of the dawn of a new age. The artist chose this painting to reproduce in his portfolio published in Hong Kong in 1963.

JA KS

Tiger Lying in the Palace 虎臥鳳闕

undated ink and color on paper 30.8 × 25.4 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2011.07.503

The title written by the artist on this painting, Tiger Lying in the Palace, comes from an often-quoted critique by Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (464–549) of Wang Xizhi’s 王羲之 (303–361) calligraphy. He praised Wang’s forceful brushwork and stable and well-structured characters as resembling dragons leaping the heavenly gate and tigers sleeping in the palace. In a playful gesture, Woo takes the critique literally by painting a sleeping tiger with the vigorous brushstrokes of a leaping dragon. In the inscription Woo writes that his own brushwork cannot compare with the beauty of Wang Xizhi’s, but at least it is free of the vulgarity of a commercial painter. Although this is a subject that was quite popular on the mid-twentieth-century Chinese art market, Woo captures the more expressive style of a literati painter in this work.

JA KS

Cat

undated ink on paper

27 × 26 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H Wu 2015.02.21

Although cats appear occasionally in court painting from the Song dynasty and later, they were not a common subject in premodern Chinese painting. One exception is a charming image of a striped tabby painted by the Suzhou scholar-artist Shen Zhou 沈 周 (1427–1509) in his 1494 album Images Drawn from Life. Shen’s work, in ink with only light color, depicts a plump creature foreshortened into an almost spherical shape, with slitted pupils conspicuously aimed toward a target outside the painting’s right border. The fifteenth-century painting was well-published in the twentieth century and might have inspired Woo. In Woo’s similarly frontal depiction of a crouched cat, however, the reflected light in the creature’s eyes and more accurate foreshortening offer a modern challenge to the literati prototype. More directly relevant, however, are paintings of cats by Ren Yi 任頤 (1840–1895) and by Woo’s friend Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1895–1953), both of whom used rich washes to model their animals.

JA KS

52

Peach Blossom

1989

ink and color on paper 15.4 × 23 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2011.07.194

Woo passed away on August 12, 1989, at the age of ninety-two. He likely painted Peach Blossom shortly before his death. Using a simple yet beautifully rendered branch of peach blossoms, a motif Woo used throughout his life as a reference to his loving memories of

Shanghai, Woo once more expresses his deep nostalgia for his hometown. In his poem inscription, Woo writes:

一別桃花再見難

夢中寫此聊慰相思 熊去二十六年

矣 而此花常在

It has been twenty-six years since I left [Shanghai], yet this flower has always been with me. Once we parted, it was not easy to see each other again. I painted this from my dreams to express my longing.

HMS

Asking the Way in Autumn Mountains undated

album leaf, ink and color on paper 30.8 × 24.13 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu 2015.02.08

A leaf from Woo’s undated album After the Ancients, in the style of the old masters, this complex composition was inspired by the painting of the Yuan-dynasty scholar-painter Wang Meng 王蒙 (ca. 1308–1385). The dry, wavy strokes that texture the distant mountains and resemble the unraveled strands of a rope (hemp-fiber texture strokes) and the partially illuminated boulders at its crest (alum-lump rocks) are earlier conventions that Wang Meng revived. Woo evokes Wang’s style with the densely constructed mountain, rich surface texture, highly animated trees, and constricted space. He further energizes the painting by adding color to the riverside dwelling, bridge, and human figure, in contrast to the monochromatic mountains. Woo differs from Wang Meng, however, in the three strange pine trees at left in the style of Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555–1636), which draw us into the composition. Woo also adds a narrative touch, as the small figure on the bridge turns to face the wind.

JA KS

43

Sparrow and Flowers

1987 ink and color on paper each 22 × 15 cm

The Frank Museum of Art, Otterbein University

C.Y. Woo Collection, donated by T.H. Wu

2015.02.05a–c

Sparrow and Flowers, a triptych from the Woo’s old age, revisits a subject for which Shanghai school artists are

best known: birds and flowers. Each of the three sparrows is paired with a different vividly colored blossoming branch and arranged in a bold and dramatic composition. Woo’s use of quickly applied mogu (boneless) wash enables him to capture the momentary appearance of these rapidly moving creatures, as though they will soon flutter away. The painting at right records that Woo painted it at the age of eighty-nine and bears a seal

at lower left with the studio name Hongyulou (Red Rain Pavilion), which he had used since his Shanghai days. Woo signed the painting at the far left with a nickname “Old Fangfei, Yung,” and recognized his advanced age with a seal reading “Both the calligrapher and the calligraphy are old.”

JA KS