Aspirations and Illusions: A Trompe L'oeil Collage tradition in Chinese Painting

A radically new genre of painting appeared in China during the mid-nineteenth century and then disappeared, forgotten in the dust heaps of history. Artists – calling their paintings bapo, Eight Brokens -- depicted scattered, deteriorating papers, usually of artistic and scholarly importance, arranged in a collage-like appearance. Torn, worm-eaten calligraphies, paintings, printed pages lay alongside quotidian ephemera, such as advertisements and postmarked envelopes. Now, in the twenty-first century, the time is ripe to explore and recognize the ingenuity, creativity, aesthetics, humor, and literati expressions of these unique paintings. Nancy Berliner examines the story of the mysterious development of bapo in China and the layered stories the artists were telling.

 

Nancy Berliner, PhD., a historian of Chinese art and architecture, is the Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her most recent exhibition is “Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls? Chinese Painting from the Museum of Fine Arts.” Until 2012, she was the Curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum and curator of Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year old rural Chinese house now at the Peabody Essex Museum. She also serves as an interpretive and curatorial advisor to the World Monuments Fund on the Qianlong Garden, Forbidden City, conservation project in Beijing.  Her undergraduate and graduate studies were done at Harvard University, and she did additional studies at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing. Her research, writing and curatorial work has considered a broader definition of Chinese art, including Chinese architecture, gardens and furniture, as well as popular and vernacular cultures. She is the author of Chinese Folk Art: The Small Skills of Carving Insects; Friends of the House, Furniture of China’s Towns and Villages; Beyond the Screen, Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries; Yin Yu Tang, the Daily Life and Architecture of a Chinese House, which was selected as a Notable Book of 2003 by the New York Times Book Review Section; co-author with Edward Cooke of Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions, and editor of Juanqinzhai in the Qianlong Garden. She has curated exhibitions of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum, the China Institute, Yale University Art Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She is curator of the exhibition The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, (seen at Peabody Essex Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Museum of Art) and author of the exhibition’s accompanying book. She is currently completing a book and preparing an exhibition on the Chinese tradition bapo painting, trompe-l’oeil depictions of collaged literati ephemera. 

 

 

First presented in 1982 in celebration of his 80th birthday, the Sammy Yukuan Lee Lectures on Chinese Art and Archaeology honors the life and philanthropy of respected businessman, art collector, and Chinese art authority, Sammy Yukuan Lee. This series is presented annually by the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies with support from the Sammy Yukuan Lee Foundation, and in partnership with the Fowler Museum at UCLA

 

Parking on the UCLA campus is $12. Enter UCLA from Sunset Blvd. at Westwood Plaza. Parking attendants will direct you to Lot 4. There is an elevator at the southeast end of Lot 4 and a stairwell at the northeast end, closest to the museum.

 

The lecture and museum admission are free and open to the public.

A reception with refreshments will follow the talk.

 

For directions or more information, please call (310) 825-8683 or email china@international.ucla.edu.

 

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Sammy Yukuan Lee Foundation