Wang Chi-yuan, Shu-chi Chang, and Wang Yachen

– Joseph Z. Chang

Wang Jiyuan. Purple Magnolias (1963). Ink on paper, 11.25 x 15.875 in. Courtesy of the Belfield Trust Collection.

This exhibition gathers the work of three Chinese American painters whose lives tell the story of two nations impacted by the turmoil of the last century. All born around the turn of the twentieth century in southern China, Wang Chi-yuan (1893–1975), Shu-chi Chang (1900–1957), and Wang Yachen (1894–1983) lived through the falls of Imperial and Republican China and, even before they began imparting the values of Chinese painting to American audiences, they were active in shaping art education and innovation in China through their roles as leaders of art academies and members of overlapping art societies during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

All three of these artists were products of an internationalized arts education program in China that promoted developing skills in both ink and oil painting traditions, a system that sometimes resulted in a stylistic hybridity that can be appreciated as an early expression of a more global orientation. In fact, Wang Chi-yuan and Wang Yachen taught oil painting in China before relocating to the United States, where they then pursued ink painting. They should also be recognized as cultural ambassadors who helped build a stronger American community for the appreciation of Asian ink painting styles and iconography.

The three artists represent a wave of high-profile Chinese immigrations to the United States as a result of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1927–1950), during which time the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 permitted Chinese immigrants to the United States to gain naturalized citizenship status. Although Chinese artists had sporadically immigrated to the United States prior to the twentieth century, none had made a significant impact on the American perception of Chinese art and culture. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, however, Chinese artists acted as representatives of their country abroad as China lost ground to Japan. Artists like Shu-chi Chang toured the United States to raise awareness of the plight of the Chinese people and to raise money for the war effort. In late 1941, Chang arrived in the United States with a specific mission: to deliver his monumental ink painting, Messengers of Peace, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a gift from the Chinese government. Before Chang could conclude his diplomatic trip, the bombing of Pearl Harbor promptly ignited the Pacific War and redirected Chang’s fate. Chang later married San Franciscan Helen Fong and established the Chang Art Studio in Oakland. Along with reproducing Chang’s paintings on stationery and greeting cards, the studio allowed Chang to teach Chinese painting to American students.
His refined brushwork as a bird-and-flower painter transformed in response to the California landscape, and he began to use more rugged brushwork to depict the scenery of Carmel and Yosemite in particular. During World War II and the 1950s, he exhibited widely across North America and became the most well-known Chinese artist in America. His work has been featured in several exhibitions as well as films, in a national radio broadcast narrated by Pearl S. Buck, and in a feature in Life magazine. To celebrate the memory of her late husband, Chang’s widow established a memorial gallery and published a book of Chang’s work, Painting in the Chinese Manner. Unfortunately, Chang’s early death in 1957 limited the scope of his reputation and influence.

In Shanghai, Wang Chi-yuan was the head of Western painting at the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting and belonged to influential painting societies that tried, in different ways, to revitalize Chinese painting through modernization and selective adoption of Western styles. Shortly after immigrating to the United States in 1941, Wang, who eventually settled in New York, participated in an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Witnessing the growing interest in Chinese painting in America, Wang opened the School of Chinese Brushwork in 1947 in his home on the Upper East Side, where for the remainder of his life he taught ink painting, calligraphy, and the synthesis of ink brushwork and Western techniques to American students.

A colleague of Wang Chi-yuan at the Shanghai Art Academy, Wang Yachen was a foreign-trained oil painter whose teaching, leadership, and writings left an indelible mark on the Chinese art world. Common among intellectuals at the time, artists like Wang felt it was their civic responsibility as the educated elite to build and defend their new nation. On the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Wang led the Chinese Painting Society, an elite Shanghai group whose mission was to develop and publicize traditional Chinese art to raise China’s international status. In the same year, shortly after Wang returned from Tokyo and Paris to serve as the president of the Xinhua Art College, Japanese bombs destroyed the campus. Sponsored by the Chinese government to study modern art in the United States in 1947, Wang Yachen became stranded there by the Chinese Civil War. Settling in New York and eventually finding private patronage for his ink painting, Wang lived alone in the United States for the next thirty years. His sensitive depictions of the Kennedy family, for whom he was a private teacher after the president’s death, perhaps reveal his yearning for his own family back in China.

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