Hou-Mei Sung – författare

Woo Chong Yung, (Wu Zhongxiong), (1898–1989), also known in the USA as C. Y. Woo, was a highly accomplished painter, calligrapher, and poet from Shanghai. During the 1920s to 1940s, Woo was at the center of China’s cultural world, feted in art circles in both Shanghai and Beijing. However, faced with political persecution in the 1960s, he migrated to Ohio before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Once in the United States, he became an active presence in the local community, teaching classes in Chinese painting and martial arts, exhibiting and lecturing in local colleges, and contributing his talents to local arts councils and ethnic festivals in Columbus and central Ohio. His lifetime works were collected exclusively by Cincinnati Art Museum and the Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University which, until now, have gone unseen by the public.This ground-breaking catalog illustrates Woo’s unique position in Chinese painting history. His remarkable experience of emigrating from China in the face of political persecution in the 1960s and becoming an American utterly transformed and reshaped both his life and painting.

During the Ming Dynasty numerous new animal themes were created to convey political and ethical messages current at court. As the result a sophisticated language of Chinese animal painting was developed, employing both the animals’ symbolic associations and homonymic puns. Hou-mei Sung’s exciting rediscovery of some of these lost meanings has led to a full-scale investigation of the evolving history of Chinese animal painting.  Distinct symbolic meanings were associated with individual motifs, but all animals were assigned a place in the universe according to the Chinese concept of nature. From the very early yin/yang cosmology to later developments of Daoist and Confucian philosophies and ethics, Chinese animals gained new meanings related to their historical contexts. This book explores these new findings, using the colorful animal images and their rich and evolving symbolic meanings to gain insight into unique aspects of Chinese art, as well as Chinese culture and history.   Exhibition Schedule:Cincinnati Museum of Art (October 2009 – February 2010)