Chinese art collection adds appeal to US Rust Belt town

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is near and dear to the heart of the 86-year-old Anthony Yen as the U.S. Rust Belt city institution houses one of the most distinguished Chinese art collections in the West.

Per Knutas, chief conservator of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), speaks during an interview at the CMA in Cleveland, Ohio, the United States, Aug. 23, 2018. Located about 8 kilometers east of downtown Cleveland, the CMA, which has nearly 45,000 artworks spanning 6,000 years, consistently ranks as one of the best comprehensive art museums in the U.S. and one of the most-visited in the world. [Photo/Xinhua]

"It's the best attraction in Cleveland. It's a perfect place to learn and appreciate Chinese culture. It means so much to me as a Chinese immigrant," said Yen, 86, a prominent entrepreneur and an inductee of the Cleveland International Hall of Fame.

Window into Chinese history and culture

Located about 5 miles (8 km) east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, The CMA, which has nearly 45,000 pieces of artwork spanning 6,000 years, consistently ranks as one of the best comprehensive art museums in the United States and one of the most-visited in the world.

The museum, which just marked its centennial in 2016, was founded as an institution dedicated to "the benefit of all the people forever," William Griswold, director and president of the museum told Xinhua in a recent interview at the new West Wing galleries on Chinese art.

"We offer free general admission and our collection is encyclopedic in scope and so it spans all periods from the Neolithic to the present, it spans every corner of the globe," he said.

Chinese art collection is the CMA's special strength, said Griswold. "We have, from the outset, from even before we opened our door to public, had works of Chinese art in our collection... We continue to add to that collection and we are extremely proud of the representation of Chinese art."

From prehistory to today, the CMA's Chinese art collection spans more than 5,000 years and embraces a diversity of art forms including jade, bronze, lacquer, sculpture, paintings, calligraphy, furniture, bamboo carvings, and more.

"This museum is one of the few museums in the West that gives the Asian collections an equal standing among other collections, and in particular Chinese collections are known worldwide in quality in comparison to other museum collections," said Clarissa von Spee, PhD, the museum's curator of Chinese art.

Sherman Lee, the CMA's director from 1958 to 1983, established the core of its Chinese painting collection, which numbers roughly 500 objects, or about 10 percent of the museum's entire Asian collection.

The collection might be dwarfed numerically by the more than 2 million objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, yet it is outstanding in terms of the high quality of each object as well as the breadth of the material, said von Spee, who joined the CMA in 2016 after eight years at the British Museum as curator of the Chinese and Central Asian collections.

The most outstanding sections of the Chinese collection are paintings from the Song to Qing dynasties, or from the 10th to the 19th century, representing the highest level of Chinese artistic accomplishment, she said.

A best example, von Spee said, is an 11-foot-3-inch (3.42 meters) long scroll created by Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), a leading Ming Dynasty painter, calligrapher and scholar.

It is poem written by Wen to express his gratitude to the Jiajing Emperor, who ruled from 1521 to 1567, for a gift of embroidered silk to him, she said.

The work is one of the master pieces of 16th century Chinese calligraphy executed in the cursive style of writing -- the "running style" in which individual strokes used to construct each character run together in a whirlwind of arcs, slashes, squiggles, dots and dashes.

"China is playing a more important role in the world, and it is important that we learn more Chinese, we understand China better, through its history, through its culture and through its works of art," von Spee said. "China's enormous importance now is actually reflected in the magnificence of art China produced."

Center for Chinese painting conservation expertise

The CMA steps forward as a leader among very few U.S. museums to advance the field of Chinese painting conservation for all future generations as the museum announced in July the establishment of a center for Chinese paintings conservation.

"We have through generous donations from June and Simon Li matched the grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and we are starting a Chinese paintings conservation training center in 2020," said Per Knutas, the CMA'S chief conservator.

"There was a crisis in the community that we have currently four museums in the U.S. with Chinese painting conservation. We are one of them," Knutas said. The other three are the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The senior conservators at the museums are about to retire and there is nobody taking over the profession in the United States, so Mellon foundation decided to fund a center for Chinese paintings conservation in 2012, the CMA decided to take on that task, Knutas recalled. The superb historic Chinese paintings represent a major conservation challenge given the fragile nature of the materials used to create them.

The center is named after June Li, the retired founding curator of the Garden of Flowing Fragrance at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and her husband, Simon K.C. Li, a retired former assistant business editor of the Los Angeles Times. The 1.5 million U.S. dollar Li gift matches a 1.5 million U.S. dollar endowment challenge grant awarded by the Mellon Foundation.

"This is an encyclopedic collection, so each object here fills a unique story about our common cultural heritage. So it's important for us to take care of the objects to tell the story for future generations," Knutas said.

"It would be irresponsible of us to not care for the Chinese paintings conservation collection the way we care for the Western collection, so we have such a strong collection, it's of enormous importance to the community," he added.

The center, the second outside China after one established at the British Museum in London, will focus first on conserving paintings in the museum's own collection, and will then branch out to aid other institutions, Knutas said.

"So we are now bringing in senior conservators from China to train our midcareer conservators to properly care for the collection," he said. "After 2020, we'll continue the program to educate the next generation, so we have a solid foundation of the profession here in the U.S. and obviously it will be a unique brand of conservation."

Digital museum-going experience

The CMA is also known for using digital innovation to promote individual and social participation, and open an enlightened public discourse to help people start a relationship with the museum's collection.

"One of them is the Art Lens Gallery which brings together technology and original works of art in an exciting way for visitors of all ages including those who may be unfamiliar with the experience of visiting museums," said Griswold.

The multi-faceted ArtLens Gallery experience includes four components. Guests can engage with masterworks through touchscreen-free interactives in ArtLens Exhibition, create original artwork in ArtLens Studio, connect with the museum's world-class permanent collection at the ArtLens Wall and enhance the entire museum experience with the ArtLens App.

"We are all in the process now of developing a highlights tour specifically for the Chinese collection," Griswold said.

The CMA will receive over 700,000 visitors this year and aspire to receive a million visitors a year within the next 10 years, Griswold said.

"We receive many Chinese visitors but far fewer than I would like and I hope that in the years to come we will see many more visitors here from China as from other parts of the world. It is a priority for us," he said.

"The world is shrinking and we share a culture history that for humanity that is very very important... the more you understand each other the better we can communicate and understand our decisions for the future," he said.

"So the conservation of the scrolls and then in the art here in the museum is conferring these narrative that binds us together and it will help in the bigger picture in the world I believe," Griswold said.