Chinese art exhibits grow alongside nation’s artistic influence
With Chinese travelers being able to visit the United States on more relaxed visa rules implemented in November, Chinese tourism has soared and benefited American museums and businesses.
According to a 2014 fact sheet prepared by the White House office of the press secretary, 1.8 million Chinese tourists visited America and spent $21.1 billion, supporting more than 109,000 U.S. jobs. These tourists spend an average $1,086 per day while on vacation, excluding accommodation costs, said a report on Hotels.com’s Chinese International Travel Monitor.
Todd DeShields Smith, chief executive and director of Orange County Museum of Art, said the museum’s current installation exhibits an extended look at Chinese artists and culture as part of an emerging international conversation.
“My Generation: Young Chinese Artists,” the museum’s current exhibition on view till Oct. 11, looks at the new generation of artists emerging in China since 2000. In addition to the exhibition, OCMA will present a lecture on performance art and host a dinner exploring Asian-inspired food creations along with traditional dishes and a drumming and tea ceremony.
“As an institution, we’ve begun programs that look at the Pacific Rim region because this museum has always been a region for emerging artists,” DeShields said. “We also know the Asian community continues to grow and we want to represent the broader range.”
OCMA partnered with Segerstrom Center for the Arts to host a free kite festival Sunday on the performing arts campus for children to discover the origins of kite flying in ancient China.
Segerstrom Center for the Arts will also celebrate Chinese artistry by hosting National Acrobats of China on Sept. 26.
For Taiwanese artist Loretta Hui-shan Yang, founder and art director of Liuli Crystal Art who recently opened a boutique at South Coast Plaza, sharing her nation’s culture has been her greatest inspiration in creating glass sculptures.
But glasswork is not Yang’s first claim to fame.
In the 1970s, she was an award-winning film actress and a household name in Taiwan.
The two-time winner of the Best Leading Actress award at the Golden Horse Awards, a film festival held annually in Taiwan, left the film industry in 1987 and committed herself to rediscovering the technique of Chinese glass casting. Today, Yang has used the technique to create works with a traditional Chinese artistic flare.
Her interest in glass art sparked when she came across a crystal sculpture in a scene for a movie she was filming in the 1980s. She was immediately attracted to the piece of crystal home decor.
“They were all European-made, so I remember thinking, ‘Why don’t the Chinese have anything so beautiful similar to this?’” she said. “The beauty of crystal glass, beyond its appearance, is in its fragility — the idea that such a thing can be consummately impermanent.”
That year, Yang retired from the film industry and set out on learning the craft so she could reintroduce the art of Chinese lost-wax casting to the world. She and Taiwanese film director Chang Yi teamed up to investigate the art’s history and learned that the process of duplicating metal sculptures cast from an original sculpture stemmed back to the Han dynasty.
“This very humbling experience showed us just how much we didn’t know about our own culture,” Yang said. “It also demonstrated how impermanent said culture can be, which is why I felt it my responsibility to reintroduce this heritage to the world.”
In 1987, the two founded Liuligongfang, shortened to Liuli Crystal Art, and has 70 locations around the world. The brand’s art has been exhibited in more than 30 countries and has been collected by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.
Crystal gifts range from $100 to over $10,000 including “Dragon of Authority: ‘An Overwhelming Force from the East,” for $136,800. Symbolism is noted behind each piece and the dragon was stated to signify success, victory, power, courage, excellence, boldness, bravery, nobility and heroism.
Yang said she creates works that implement Chinese philosophy and the dynamics of the human experience.
“I want the traditional Chinese heritage to be well-represented in our artworks on a global scale,” Yang said. “Our art has always embodied these very universal ideas of ephemerality, fleeting beauty, humility and harmony. So even though they are stylistically Chinese, they are messages and feelings meant for all peoples.”