Archives: Activity

Overview:
The itinerary will follow the footsteps of ancient Buddhist priests along the Silk Road in Qinghai and Southern Gansu provinces. It includes a visit to a Neolithic site at Liuwan where 1,500 tombs were discovered, yielding a large quantity of attractive painted pottery.

Founded in the Hongwu period (1368-1398), Qutan Si is a well-preserved architectural gem near Liuwan. It houses a number of exquisite Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Buddhist statues. Its wall paintings vividly depict the life of the Buddha Sakyamuni.

Ta’er Si and Labuleng Si are the greatest monasteries in Qinghai and Gansu for training Lama monks. Both have important collections of Tibetan Buddhist tangkas and sculptural works made of various materials.

The focal spots to be visited in Southern Gansu are the earliest Buddhist sites in China. They are the cave temples at Maijisan, Wushan and Binglingsi. Their history can be traced back to the late 4th century. The colourful stucco figures in these caves are of exceptional historic value for the study of Chinese Buddhist culture.

Conducted in Cantonese, this tour will be lead by our own Museum Director, Yeung Chun-tong (???). He is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong with B.A. and M.Phil. Degrees, both in Fine Arts. He is currently Honorary Associate Professor, teaching Chinese material cultures and museum studies in the Department. With over 30 years of experience and an in-depth knowledge of Chinese art and history, Director Yeung is an invaluable resource for our visit to the sites in this part of the Silk Road.

Lecture synopsis
This lecture explores the multiple facets of Indian modernism. The narrative begins with the question: If modernism, in the Western context, is defined as a rejection of tradition, just how does a 5,000-year-old traditional culture such as India manage to make modern art? It somehow unfolds to us in a more tangled and complex manner, influenced by factors such as urbanism, primitivism and neologism. Unlike their counterparts in the West, Indian artists made modern art not by shocking and rejecting, but by assimilating elements from innumerable artistic traditions.

Modernism first took root on the Indian subcontinent with the establishment of colonial art colleges that followed the curriculum of the Royal College of Arts in London. The introduction of Western ideas generated great debate and conflict. Hence a group of Asian and European intellectuals, including Englishman Ernst Binfield, Japanese curator Okakuro Kakuzo and Chinese artist Xu Beihong, created the Pan-Asian alliance to counteract the pervasive influence of Western academic naturalism promoted by the government colleges. The movement swept through India and spread to other Asian countries as well, resulting in an international aesthetic and ideology. Thus began the story of Indian modernism.

The speaker
Sundaram Tagore is a New York-based art historian and gallerist. A descendant of the influential poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogues in multicultural and multidisciplinary events globally. He has worked with many international organizations including The Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice, Italy; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; United Nations; Pace Wildenstein Gallery. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Oxford University, and he writes for numerous art publications. In 1999, he was nominated by Avenue magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Asian Americans in the United States. Recently, he was profiled in a 30-minute special interview with CNN International’s Talk Asia.

The University of Hong Kong Museum Society is proud to present an exciting summer tour for our members this year. We will be led by architect Alex Hui
( 許日銓 ), former Curator of the University of Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery, and past Director of Hong Kong Arts Centre. This exclusive art and architecture tour is designed to introduce our members to the most forward-looking art festival in Asia, the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial. In addition, we will visit at least six top-notch museums, special restaurants and designer hotels. By the end of our tour, we would have made a loop around the area and seen some wonderful gems of Japanese architecture rarely visited.

Our trip will last 7 days plus an optional extension – details have been mailed out earlier but here is a summary of the trip.

Itinerary:
Day 1 – Friday, 5 June 2009

We will meet in the morning to begin the tour. Our bus will pick us up in Tokyo (at a location to be advised) and our first stop will be Hara Museum and the Kankai Annex. Then we continue on to Echigo Tsumari where we will stay for the next few days to view art works in the company of the curators of the show. We will stay in a small ryokan and experience rural hospitality. Please note that as with rural traditional ryokans, facilities are shared, in a small home atmosphere. Treat this as an experience of traditional Japanese way of life.

May-June 2009 9
Day 2 & 3 – Saturday and Sunday, 6-7 June 2009

We will view a selection of works from amongst the hundreds of art works on show. These art works are all site specific installations and what is notable is that the local community has a large say in which art work stays and which goes as they are the ones living with the works. If the community chooses to ignore and not maintain the work, it will be gone sooner or later, maybe even after the first snow bound winter!

Day 4 & 5 – Monday and Tuesday, 8-9 June 2009

Traveling westward to the Japanese Alps, we visit Chihiro Art Museum designed by Hiroshi Naito, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Waseda University. Another museum to visit is Matsumoto City Museum of Art where the permanent collection of Yayoi Kusama is kept.

Day 6 & 7 – Wednesday and Thursday, 10-11 June

Our last two days will be in Kawaguchi area where we will stay in Risonare, an award winning highland resort hotel. While in the highlands, we will visit Tadao Ando's Koumi-machi Kogen Museum of Art as well as Fuji Harness, the headquarters of the Japan Guide Dog Association designed by architect Chiba Manabu. Transportation will be arranged for members to return to Tokyo, or if members are taking the Yokohama extension, then to the hotel in Yokohama.

Optional Extension tour to Yokohama and Kamakura
"Y 150" celebrates 150 years of the Port of Yokohama – There is a 2-night extension for those interested in spending some extra time in the area.

Lecture Synopsis:
This talk will introduce themes from an exhibition of paintings, on loan from the Shanghai Museum, to be mounted at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin in early 2010. Each of these 38 paintings retells some kind of story from Chinese legend, folklore, literature or history. While many of the tales will be familiar in China, the ways they were illustrated in painted scrolls and albums are less well known. Individually, these images and the tales they describe have the power to delight viewers; taken together, they can also give a taste of China’s rich lyric tradition.

The show includes narrative paintings that describe the plotlines of emotive tales through sequences of pictorial images, as well as portraits of individuals or groups. Historically, such images were often the starting point for viewers’ individual reminiscences on a figure’s humanity or place in culture. Included are tales like that of the Chinese lady Wenji, who in ancient times was married to a “barbarian” chieftain, bore his children, and was later faced with the harrowing decision of whether to return to China without them. This tale lay at the heart of an ongoing definition of Chinese culture through history, but also has resonance for Chinese people at home and abroad today. Other tales of “scholars and beauties”, demon-slayers and Taoist immortals similarly continue to have relevance in daily life and the popular imagination.

This exhibition sets out to explore the dynamic interplay of words and pictorial images in the art of China’s last two imperial dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911), and into the Republican period. It explores how narratives took form in pictures, and how portraits and genre scenes could transmit cultural memories. In highlighting themes, from exile and longing, to supernatural and religious lore, to the morality of history and the delights of romance, the exhibition shows how successive generations of artists gave new life to learning, devotion and leisure in pictorial images fit for their own times.

The Speaker:
Dr. Shane McCausland is Head of Collections and also Curator of the East Asian Collections at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. In 2003-04 he was Sainsbury Fellow in the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, based at the SOAS, University of London, where he was previously a lecturer in Chinese art history. He has a doctorate from Princeton University (2000). In 2003, he published The Admonitions Scroll: First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting and Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll (contributing editor) (both British Museum Press). His Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China is forthcoming from Hong Kong University Press in 2010.

Venue:
A double treat for our members – we are privileged to be dining at the exclusive Min Chiu Society Club. It was founded in 1960 by a group of Hong Kong collectors and connoisseurs. Today, with 50 members, they continue to work towards their goal of propagating and preserving traditional Chinese art and culture. This prestigious Society has extensive contacts with curators, collectors and scholars from China and overseas. The members’ collections have been individually or collectively exhibited or loan to various museums.