Major exhibition of Chinese art to open at Spencer Museum of Art at KU

LAWRENCE -- "The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chinese Painting from the University of Michigan Museum of Art," an exhibition of 60 masterpieces of Chinese painting spanning nearly 900 years, will open Saturday, Aug. 16, at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. The exhibition will remain on view until Oct. 26.

The exhibition of hanging scrolls and hand scrolls ranging in date from the 12th century to the present provides a rare opportunity to survey the rich tradition and evolution of painting in China. This is the first traveling exhibition of the University of Michigan's important collection and it includes rare and fragile paintings never exhibited together before. The exhibition and its catalog were made possible by Ford Motor Co.

One of the strengths of the exhibition is the rare works of the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties.

The exhibition curator is Marshall Wu, senior curator of Asian art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Wu says the exhibition works to address and explain many of the cultural and language barriers that sometimes keep Western audiences from fully appreciating Chinese painting, which often represents attempts to unify the mind and soul of the viewer with nature.

Among the consultants for the exhibition was Chu-tsing Li, the emeritus Judith Harris Murphy professor of the history of art at KU. Li will lecture on "The Orchid Pavilion: The Origin of Literary Gathering in China" at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in the Spencer museum auditorium. Other events include a noon Tour du Jour by Marsha Haufler, KU professor of Chinese art; a screening of the Chinese feature film "To Live"; and a showing of the video "A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China."

The title of the exhibition comes from a famous event in Chinese history that is depicted in a painting in the show, a work by Sheng Mao-yeh from the Ming dynasty. During the Tsin dynasty (317-419), a famous Chinese calligrapher, Wang Xichi, and his friends and relatives would gather at the Orchid Pavilion, a private retreat Wang had built in a mountain valley near the modern city of Shaoxing, for springtime purification rituals. The participants assembled along the banks of a meandering creek. As cups were floated down the stream, each guest was charged to compose a poem when a cup arrived at his spot or else drink three dippers of wine. The drinking, conversation and relaxation in the country became a symbol of retreat from the stresses of bureaucratic life, and the subject of the Orchid Pavilion has been repeated frequently in Chinese and Japanese painting.

The exhibition has a two-volume catalog, written by Wu, that includes historical data, biographies of the artists, and stylistic analysis of the paintings, detailed illustrations, documents, and extensive scholarly investigation of the works. The Spencer museum display of the exhibition was supported by a grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.