Hongtu Zhang / Zhang Hongtu,
Wang Meng-van Gogh #2, 2004

January 13 – March 11, 2006

Friday, January 13
Idiosyncratic Hybrids: Traditional East Asian Art and Contemporary Painting

USF’s School of Art and Art History, new Assistant Professor (Fall 2006) will present a lecture exploring the earliest moment in Sino-European artistic and cultural interaction with emphasis on this famous Chinese painter’s relationship with Western art and science, and relates to the East-West theme of the Dragon Veins. Chin-sung Chang (Ph.D., Yale University 2004) is currently engaged in research related to a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Previously, Dr. Chang received two Masters’ degrees from Yale and another Master’s from Columbia University. His Bachelor’s degree is from Seoul National University, South Korea. A recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship and a Council on East Asian Studies Prize from Yale, his research works have been published in the U.S. and Korea. He has delivered research papers at international conferences in San Diego, Seattle, Boston and New York. His dissertation was “Mountains and Rivers, Pure and Splendid: Wang Hui (1632-1717) and the Making of LandscapePanoramas in Early Qing China”.

Susanne Kühn, Waterfall, 2002. Oil on canvas.

Dragon Veins surveys a variety of ways in which traditional East Asian art informs contemporary painting. In traditional Chinese art, dragon veins are the invisible threads or connectives which hold a painting together. As an exhibition title, it offers a metaphor for ways the artists idiosyncratically mine East Asian traditions of Chinese landscape painting, Buddhism, ukiyo-e, emaki, bunraku, nihon-ga and kazari, intermixing them with current political events, hip-hop culture, geological maps, modernist abstraction, bodily experience, Dr. Seuss, anime, Post-Impressionism and more. Artists include Frances Barth, David Brody, iona rozeal brown, Emily Cheng, Elisabeth Condon, Chie Fueki, Yun-Fei Ji, Susanne Kühn, Mernet Larsen, Sang Nam Lee, Takashi Murakami, and Zhang Hongtu. The exhibition also includes a new wall painting by David Brody, commissioned by USF CAM. Dragon Veins is organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum, and curated by Elisabeth Condon and Mernet Larsen.

This exhibition is made possible by the Members and Corporate Partners of USFCAM, and Sponsored by Central Florida Eurocars

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