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