Did you know Indiana Jones is probably based on an early Philadelphia Museum of Art director?
And other revelations from our conversation with Hiromi Kinoshita, Philadelphia Museum of Arts’ curator of Chinese art, who walked us through “Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art.”
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As curator of Chinese art and head of the East Asian Art department, Hiromi Kinoshita has spent decades in front of fragile scrolls, frayed manuscripts, and rough-hewn statues. “Chinese art goes back to 3000 B.C., so I have to deal with 5,000 years of culture,” Kinoshita said. She is the head curator of Chinese art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the author of the 2018 book Art of China: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For the latest show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she found herself face to face with brand new Chinese art, made by contemporary painters and sculptors working out of studios in New York, Beijing, and the mountains of rural China.
“When I realized we didn’t have much contemporary Chinese art at the museum, I decided to actively start collecting it,” she said. For a visitor who knows nothing about Chinese art, “I think it can be easier to make that connection with a contemporary piece.”
Kinoshita took us on a tour of “Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art,” on view until Oct. 29.
My first question is probably an obvious one, but I don’t know the answer. How does this museum have so much Chinese art?
In the early days our museum worked with the Penn Museum, which was doing archaeological digs. So a lot of the Islamic tile work and other stonework came through that. But Asia has always fascinated the West. The 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia boosted that interest in Asia, since there were pavilions for China and Japan. Prominent Philly collectors usually collected some sort of Chinese or Japanese work. For example Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore gave us more than 2,000 pieces, of which at least 100 are Chinese.
It’s also because of [one of the museum’s early directors] Langdon Warner. They say Indiana Jones was partially based on him. In the early 20th century, he was going off to Asia and collecting art, and that’s why the Philly museum has this great collection. We were collecting it before the Met and the Boston Museum.
The first artist we see in this show is Ming Fay. We’re looking at two of his sculptures, “Itchy Ball” and “Sweet Gum,” which appear to be very large versions of tree seeds you might see on a sidewalk. And inside the next room there are more sculptures from his fruit series, including two cherries the size of softballs.
Ming Fay is a sculptor who is now in his 80s. He was born in Shanghai but has lived in New York for a long time. I wanted to include him because he defies the idea of what people think Chinese art should be. He takes things from nature and then blows them up to large sizes. “Itchy Ball” and “Sweet Gum” are mainly made of papier-mâché. Ming Fay has what I think of as a Taoist idea of nature: By blowing things up, you feel more insignificant. His fascination with seeds has to do with procreation, how all life comes from a seed.
Now we’re looking at two 12-foot ink scrolls, which is very tall for an ink painting. One is from a 16th-century painter, Xu Wei, and the other was painted in 2022 by Wang Mansheng.
Xu Wei was a very charismatic artist and poet from the Ming Dynasty. He went a bit mad — people think he may have had bipolar disease. His “Sixteen Flowers” shows 16 different flowers all blooming at once. When I told Wang Mansheng I would be hanging this painting in the show, he said he wanted to create a work that would complement it. Wang paints a blooming magnolia. He uses traditional Chinese material and method: ink that he makes from black walnuts, on a hanging scroll depicting nature. This piece is called “Tiger and Deer, Drinking Together.”
Here is another pairing of old and new: this time an ink painting is laid flat and above it hangs a traditional Chinese emperor’s robe. The painting is a cloudy, dragon-filled scene called “Fanghu Isle of the Immortals,” painted in 2021 by Tai Xiangzhou.
Tai Xiangzhou is an art historian who did his Ph.D. in Chinese cosmology. In traditional cosmology belief systems, the emperor believed that he was the mediator between heaven and Earth. That’s why I’ve juxtaposed this painting with an emperor’s robe. The painting has a cloudy landscape because in the East the dragon is related to rain, which you need to survive. In the East the dragon is good, whereas in the West it’s the opposite.
Finally, we’ve walked a bit to reach a palatial period room. It’s a reconstructed 17th-century reception hall from Beijing, laid out like a temple. It was installed here at the PMA in the 1940s, and for this show it’s been filled with nine hanging scrolls by the artist Bingyi. Her strokes and blotches of ink seem to run and bubble and burst with both freedom and precision. We see an artist who is very much in control, but also open to chance.
Bingyi uses water and ink, and she can control it — but not quite. Speaking of chance: She settled on one of these pictures, for example, because when she looked at it she saw a pine tree, and underneath the tree, she saw a meditating Buddha.
She has a Ph.D. in art history, so she’s very intellectual about Chinese culture and art. In this series, she’s looking at Song Dynasty painters of the 10th century. They are artists who celebrated nature as a higher being. Bingyi wanted to recreate this. She found out that a lot of the Song Dynasty painters worked in the Taihang Mountains, so she went there and painted this work. She went into the mountains, and she painted and painted. She splashes ink as she paints. She sees herself as almost a vehicle for showing what nature could be.
“Oneness: Nature and Connectivity in Chinese Art,” through Oct. 29. Galleries 321, 326, 334, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., Phila.
An earlier version of the article misrepresented Hiromi Kinoshita’s designation at the PMA. She is the curator of Chinese art and head of the East Asian Art department. She was misquoted on the origins of Chinese art, which dates to 3000 B.C.