3 Reasons to Get out to Tsinghua University Art Museum

3 Reasons to Get Your Fine Cultured Self Out to Tsinghua University Art Museum

Anna Pellegrin Hartley | Jan 30, 2019 1:00 pm | Add a comment | 604 reads

We know, we know, Tsinghua University Art Museum is a pain in the pigu to get to, but if it's been a while since you last visited the relatively new museum, which opened September 2016 (or you haven't made it out there yet at all), now's the time.

That's because they're currently showing three world-class, distinctive, and highly worthwhile shows alongside its permanent collection, including their first ever photography exhibition. Catch them before it's too late.

I Was Born Free: 60 Years of Liu Shaohui's Art

The seven sections of this exhibition – which span Chinese artist Liu Shaohui's six-decade career – showcase a spectacular breadth of artistic approach, narrative style, and exploration of both theme and form, that reflect his influence by both traditional Chinese and Western cultures and art practices.

Rooms devoted to expansive ink-on-rice paper line drawing murals, give way to towering Klimt-inspired oeuvres and then on to brooding, disjointed Picasso-like characters. Others come alive with dense paintings that practically vibrate with love of Yunnan folk culture and the fertile jungles of the southern province, in which Liu spent formative time in as a student.

After a period of multimedia cartoon collaboration, creating animated films of folk legends, Liu turns his eye toward explorations of mysticism and world religions. In another room, a cartooned frieze of Botticelli's "Venus" hang beside sub-continent figurines and the ruined temples of Angkor Wat.

It's invigorating, rich, exciting, and for a philistine like me, just plain lovely to look at.

I Was Born Free is showing in the First Floor Exhibition Hall until May 5, 2019.

Vision and Reflection: Photographs of China in the 19th Century

You probably read about this exhibition when it opened: compiled of 120 of the earliest known photographs of the Middle Kingdom, Vision and Reflection gives visitors a glimpse of what Chinese life was like over one hundred years ago, and most importantly, has never before been exhibited in Beijing.

Composed of the works of both Western and Chinese photographers, the exhibition serves as not only a record of this slice of Qing dynasty history, but also of the progression of photographic techniques themselves. Figures on the street blur in a ghostly fashion as low-shutter speeds struggle to keep up, while curious street children who hung around to watch are captured in crisp detail. Privately comissioned portraits are colorized in symbolic fashion, and portraits of important officials and military men are composed as carefully as any painting.

Large-format photographs display astonishing detail (to this day, large-format prints rival the detail capabilities of digital photography) of famous buildings and sites, some of which – such as Yuanmingyuan – having since been destroyed, giving preservationists and historians invaluable information. There is even a section devoted to panoramic landscapes of city views such as Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour – barely recognizable from today's iconic and towering skyline.

Vision and Reflection is showing on the Third Floor Exhibition Hall until Mar 31, 2019.

Americans Abroad | Landscape and Artistic Exchange, 1800–1920

Diverging from the Sino-centric theme of the previous two exhibitions, Americans Abroad features works dating from the early 1800s to the 1920s, and examines the way in which the art of England, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy influenced American landscape paintings. It also marks the first collaboration of its kind between university art museums in the United States and China.

Thanks to soft power and Coca-Cola diplomacy, it's hard to imagine a time in which American culture wasn't absolutely everywhere (though this is of course less true in China). Yet as recently as the World War I, the fledgling nation was still evolving their own distinct culture, and looked to Europe for cultural and artistic leadership, as well as cues as to how to represent their own North-American landscapes.

Regardless of how you feel about American landscape painting or American culture in general, the exhibition features works by masters such as Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Jasper F. Cropsey, Maurice Brazil Pendergast, and Winslow Homer thereby offering a unique opportunity to see some of their great works in the flesh.

Americans Abroad is showing on the Fourth Floor Exhibition Hall until Mar 17, 2019.