A conference in honor of Dr. Chu-tsing Li, Professor Emeritus, will be held November 4-5, 2005 (Friday sessions at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona and Saturday sessions at Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona) in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society Arizona State University. The theme is "Perspectives on Chinese Art: New Approaches and Reflections on Forty Years of Scholarship." Papers are requested. Send proposals for papers or panels by July 15, 2005, by mail, fax or e-mail to: Center for Asian Studies Arizona State University PO Box 871702 Tempe, AZ 85287-1702 USA Fax: (480) 965-8317 <asian.studies@asu.edu>
Dr. Chu-tsing Li, Professor Emeritus of the University of Kansas has long career in research and teaching, He has trained and inspired a generation of art historians and has brought scholarly attention to the work of many contemporary artists.
Dr. Li published a ground-breaking, in-depth study of a complex and meaningful thirteenth-century handscroll, The Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona, Switzerland, 1965), a painting once treasured by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795) and now housed in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. In 1966, Li accepted the invitation of the University of Kansas and the Nelson Gallery - Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, to establish an Asian art history program there. While establishing that program and while continuing his work on the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), Li began, in the 1960s, to bring the work of contemporary painters of the Fifth Moon Group and other artists in Hong Kong and Taiwan to attention in the United States. His exhibitions and catalogues of the works of Liu Kuo-sung and Hung Hsien led to recognition among curators and art historians of the on-going vitality of Chinese painting and its blending of abstraction and brushwork into a new idiom. In the 1970s, Li undertook a massive project to catalog the Charles A. Drenowatz Collection, Zurich (A Thousand Peaks and Myriad Ravines, 1974 and Trends in Modern Chinese Painting, 1979). His thorough research and reasoned assessment of each painting achieved a high standard, and the resulting catalogues helped to establish paintings of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the modern/contemporary periods as fields for collecting and study.
In 1979, just after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, Li was invited to be one of the five scholars who were the first group of exchange professors to visit China. Hosted by the Ministry of Culture, he traveled widely, visiting Dunhuang, Lanzhou, Shenyang and Changchun as well as the major cities. In 1987, Chu-tsing Li co-authored and co-curated The Chinese Scholar's Studio: Artistic Life in the Late Ming Period (with James C. Y. Watt for The Asia Society, New York), one of the first, and still one of the best, exhibitions bringing objects to the U.S. from the People's Republic of China. Throughout recent years, Chu-tsing Li has continued his contributions to museum exhibitions, both those examining historical works and those presenting paintings by living artists. Among the artists whose work he has written about recently are Liu Kuo-sung, Chen Chi-kwan, Lee Chun-yi, Hsia I-fu and other artists active in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. The proposed conference, developing a legacy from Chu-tsing Li and other senior scholars, will take the study of art history in yet new directions, furthering scholarship, and expanding the inter-disciplinary study of Chinese painting.