Chinese academy visits IU Art Museum

Eastern art meets a Western audience today in the IU Art Museum, where a new exhibition begins its four-month stay in the Special Exhibitions gallery.\nThe opening public lecture and reception for "Conspiring with Tradition: Contemporary Painting from the Guilin Chinese Painting Academy" begins at 5:30 p.m. Friday with a special lecture by Ohio State University professor Julia F. Andrews in the IU Radio and TV Building, Room 251. Andrews is the director of the Institute for Chinese Studies and the East Asian Studies Center at OSU. The evening continues with a reception in the Thomas T. Solley Atrium at the IU Art Museum from 6:30 to 8 p.m. \n"Conspiring with Tradition" is an exclusive exhibit of 60 paintings that will be on display in the Hexagon Gallery from Sept. 30 to Dec. 17. Unlike other traveling exhibits, the paintings in "Conspiring with Tradition" have only been shown at two other galleries. In addition, the IU Art Museum is the only museum venue where they are being exhibited.\nGuilin is a historic region of China and the home to the Guilin Chinese Painting Academy, the group of artists that includes the 13 featured in "Conspiring with Tradition." \nThe Academy is devoted to carrying on the more than 300-year tradition in China of influential Guilin painting and to explore new ways to give expression to the contemporary humanist spirit, according to a press release.\nJudy Stubbs, the Pamela Buell Curator of Asian Art and coordinating curator of "Conspiring with Tradition," said she met the inspiration for the exhibit -- retired University of Connecticut professor Herman Mast -- by chance at a cocktail party two years ago. She said a man asked her if she knew Mast, who taught Chinese history, and urged her to see his Chinese art collection. \n"He had wanted for years to do an exhibition with these artists that were his friends in China who had never had a big exhibition in the States...He had met these people many years ago and...been very interested in their careers," Stubbs said.\nStubbs said there are two major trends in contemporary Chinese art -- the international style and the New Literati. She said the international style includes things like installations and performance pieces, and the New Literati revives certain Chinese techniques or refers back to certain traditions. "Conspiring with Tradition" is a combination of both. \n"It's clearly a blend of some traditional ideas and modern Western individualism and eclecticism," Stubbs said.\nAt a donor reception Thursday evening, Mast addressed the Guilin Academy artists' movement away from traditional painting. \n"All these artists are breaking out...and (have a) very heavy Western influence," he said. \nStubbs made it clear that Chinese artists have not always been able to paint what they want and that traditional Chinese painting has a past with little-known hiccups.\n"You have to remember that China, since the revolution, has been relatively isolated and even more so in the decade between 1966 and 1977 - the Cultural Revolution - when all the art that reflected anything imperial, what we think of traditional Chinese art, was considered deviant and suspect and had ties to the imperial past; so that was not a form of art that was allowed during the cultural revolution, and certainly not something that was encouraged," Stubbs said. \n"So what we think of as an uninterrupted artistic tradition is in fact very interrupted in China."\nThere are a variety of events scheduled to coincide with the exhibition. A family day titled "A Celebration of Chinese Art and Culture" is planned for 10 to 11:30 a.m. Saturday and will include demonstrations by the artists and craft projects for children. There will be a teacher's workshop Saturday, Oct. 7, and a painting demonstration Saturday, Oct. 21 by IU alumnus Zhiyuan Cong, a painter and printmaking professor at William Paterson University. There will also be a special lecture given in Chinese, a noon gallery talk and a Chinese dance performance at later dates.