RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522
302

Mind Landscapes enables C. C. Wang to describe the challenges he faced to see paintings in a land without public museums; "There were no good museums in China at that time and you couldn't see the work of a contemporary painter in a museum or gallery. But since they had to be mounted or remounted, they could be seen in a mounter's shop. Suzhou was famous for its mounters. They would paste the paintings to be mounted on the walls of their shops, and if you walked around every few days, you could always see new paintings.” (p. 15).

Mr. Wang also talks about his teachers and how he was able to view various private collections: "For me, as well as for painter-scholars of the past, friendships with other painters and collectors were extremely significant. Each new meeting meant a new collection to see. In those days private collectors were never publicly displayed. To see a particular painting you had to know the owner.” (p. 17).

When the great Chinese Imperial Collection was being prepared for the London Exhibition at Burlington House in 1936, C. C. Wang was a consultant and had a chance to study all those great paintings another significant step in his development into a connoisseur-collector-painter.

Collecting as well as creating paintings soon became young Mr. Wang's principal preoccupation. However, he supported his collecting and his family by some real estate ventures because he was not able to make enough money through the sale of his paintings.

The story of C. C. Wang's journey to the West (New York) and attending classes at the Art Students League, his explorations of modern Western art and his artistic evolution is marvelously told through well written prose of Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Professor Silbergeld comes to his subject with a deep knowledge and background in classical Chinese painting and provides a sinological, art historical perspective of C. C. Wang's work. But the author does not avoid his role as contemporary critic, analyzing the relationship of the artist and modern art. When C. C. Wang's breakthrough to his mature style comes in 1971-2, the author allows the events to unfold like high drama. Moreover, throughout the text, the artist is permitted to state his own views on the elements of his art such as line, color, composition, dots, texture,
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h
411

Jerome Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C.C. Wang, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Press (Seattle and London), 1987. 132 pp. + plates, bibliography, index.

C.C. Wang is certainly one of the most intriguing Chinese artists of the later twentieth century. His life chronicles cataclysmic changes many Chinese have endured and his path - artist, collector, connoisseur, businessman, and exile - was rarely clear. He was continuously called upon to redefine his relationship with China and the West as he traveled, explored, and matured.

Having been born into a Suzhou family of mandarins in Imperial China in 1907 and having had a traditional Chinese education till the age of 14 assured young Wang the basis for blossoming into a twentieth-century version of the literati. But young Wang longed for a Western-style education, into which he switched at age fourteen, and from which he went on to study law in Shanghai at China's distinguished Suzhou Law School. But his art education, which started as he learned to read and write, was carried on simultaneously and ever more seriously. Over time, he had many art teachers and, indeed, became a teacher himself at an early age.

Mind Landscapes enables C.C. Wang to describe the challenges he faced in seeing paintings in a land without public museums: "There were no good museums in China at that time, and you couldn't see the work of a contemporary painter in a museum or gallery. But since they had to be mounted or remounted, they could be seen in a mounter's shop. Suzhou was famous for its mounters. They would paste the paintings to be mounted on the walls of their shops, and if you walked around every few days, you could always see new paintings," (p. 15).

Mr. Wang also talks about his teachers and how he was able to view various private collections: "For me, as well as for painter-scholars of the past, friendships with other painters and collectors were extremely significant. Each new meeting meant a new collection to see. In those days, private collections were never publicly displayed. To see a particular painting, you had to know the owner," (p. 17).

When the great Chinese Imperial Collection was being prepared for the London Exhibition at Burlington House in 1936, C.C. Wang was a consultant and had a chance to study all those great paintings — another
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