|
   |
||||
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||
|
|
MFA Unveils Chinese Art By Andrea Shea  Listen to story (Real Audio)
The rare works have been in the same family for six generations and the story behind their survival has all the drama of an epic novel. WBUR's Arts and Culture reporter Andrea Shea has more on the story. TEXT OF STORY ANDREA SHEA: The marriage of brush and ink has inspired Chinese scholars, artists and calligraphers for centuries. Dozens of delicate landscapes, and portraits of famous painters and poets, fill four rooms at the MFA. WAN-GO WENG: Once you know how to utilize that brush and ink then you can gradually appreciate what these masters of have done. SHEA: That's Wan-go Weng, the current owner of this collection. The eighty-nine year old is also a self-taught artist and scholar. He says he lives with his family's art, quite literally. WENG: If you hang a painting right by your side day and night you see a lot of things you won't see by just standing there for ? hour. Because basically Chinese art forms are private art, they're not public art.' SHEA: But here Weng's paintings are public, for the first time. In fact a specially designed case illuminates what might be seen as the lynch pin of the MFA show: a fifty-three foot hand scroll from the seventeenth century titled, 'Ten Thousand Li up the Yangtze.' The Yangtze River is the longest in Asia, and it's highly symbolic, according to Weng. The scroll is one of his family's earliest acquisitions. WENG: The collection started from my great great great grandfather. SHEA: Weng Xincun, whose son, Weng Tonghe, built up the core of the collection. Weng Tonghe was a busy man. He tutored two emperors and was a powerful bureaucrat in Beijing. But Wan-go Weng says art was his ancestor's true passion, and his release. WENG: The only way he could relax was in the Lulichang antique shops...and of course he became a customer there....and they always showed him choice items...and he got addicted, and no matter what the price is he try to bargain down and then finally he got it, like that '10,000 Leagues up the Yangtze River.' SHEA: According to Weng his great great grandfather almost lost his shirt buying this hand scroll in 1895. Regardless, he carried on, growing his collection, through dynastic shifts and unrest. Eventually the current owner, Wan-go Weng, inherited everything, but he left it behind when his father sent him to America before Japan invaded Shanghai in 1937. The young Weng studied and worked in New York, with his wife, but went home to rescue the collection in 1948 at the culmination of China's civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. WENG: And that was such a fateful year because that was a year that finally Mao Zedong's forces and Chiang Kai-shek's came to the final battles and the very last decisive battle was waged just north of the Yangtze River and we were in Shanghai, and I saw the handwriting on the wall so I decided with my wife, let's go. SHEA: But first they packed the more than four-hundred pieces, and in a risky leap of faith left the treasure with a Russian shipper who promised to get it to New York. The couple got out just before China closed its doors to the rest of the world. WENG: We took the last flight of Northwest Orient airlines from Shang Hai to NY...48 hours on a small airplane called DC-4, no air pressure. When I woke up I lost my breath. Turned blue. That's the kind of condition we returned. That was end of November, 1948. SHEA: And while Weng and his wife were safe, he says they worried themselves sick over the collection. Three torturous months later he got a call. Customs told him to bring his key. WENG: I was out of my mind in delight. I went with the key and found everything was there. SHEA: If the collection stayed in China it might have been destroyed or lost later during the Cultural Revolution. Recognizing that fragility, Weng is fully dedicated to preserving and understanding the family trove. Through it he also says he connects with the patriarch, Weng Tonghe. WENG: He is so over-powering he overshadows every one of the Wengs...and consequently I was always in his shadow. I don't think I ever get out and I don't want to get out. LING LI: Everybody knows him, not only in historical books but also in TV series about him and we admire him. SHEA: Ling Li grew up in Nan Jing and writes for 'China Press Weekly.' She's reviewing the exhibition. LI: He's the one who advocated reform the Qing court to a more open empire, and now I admire him even more because he tried his best, spent almost all of his money, to preserve all this famous artistic works and today why I can see these great works because of him. SHEA: And because of his great, great grandson, who's a Renaissance man himself. WENG I'm a scatterbrain. I'm a jack of all trades. SHEA: Weng is an artist, author, filmmaker, poet, and historian. He even did a stint at an auction house. He says it turned his stomach. And he translated Hollywood films into Chinese. Right now he's got a book deal to contend with, as well as helping out with the MFA show. And, at age eighty-nine, Weng shows no signs of slowing down. Where does he get his energy? WENG: Do you remember that famous commercial with the rabbit with the drum for the Energizer? Where he got energy? People ask me how I do it I say I feel like that rabbit I'm still going. That's all I can say. I have to thank my ancestors. I really do. I think it's partly in my genes. SHEA: Like the ancient scholars pictured in the landscape paintings hanging in the show, Weng retired to the mountains in 1978. A brook trickles through his wooded New Hampshire retreat. It may not be the Yangtze, but Weng says it helps him contemplate his art. For WBUR I'm Andrea Shea.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sponsor |
