Introduction
Mark Dean Johnson
This exhibition and catalog together examine the work of some of the Chinese artists to which Sullivan was referring, featuring them alongside their Japanese and non-Asian counterparts who were concurrently working in the medium of ink. Our principal goal is to reclaim this internationally important but mostly invisible history of Asian American ink painting.
This project also makes comment on the circumstances that may have contributed to the unexpected flowering of the genre in American art. It postulates the value of using a Sino-American perspective to explore the contributions of important but largely “under-recognized” twentieth-century American artists who as a group forged an aesthetic reflecting Asian/American international influences and who in fact helped set the stage for a twenty-first-century generation of artists who have captured the attention of the world.
About ten years ago, the preeminent twentieth-century Chinese art historian Michael Sullivan made an offhand comment that stunned me. We were discussing the work of Chinese artists he had known when Professor Sullivan said, matter-of-factly, “Many of the most important Chinese painters during the second half of the twentieth century lived in the United States.”
This exhibition and catalog together examine the work of some of the Chinese artists to which Sullivan was referring, featuring them alongside their Japanese and non-Asian counterparts who were concurrently working in the medium of ink. Our principal goal is to reclaim this internationally important but mostly invisible history of Asian American ink painting.
This project also makes comment on the circumstances that may have contributed to the unexpected flowering of the genre in American art. It postulates the value of using a Sino-American perspective to explore the contributions of important but largely “under-recognized” twentieth-century American artists who as a group forged an aesthetic reflecting Asian/American international influences and who in fact helped set the stage for a twenty-first-century generation of artists who have captured the attention of the world.
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