One of China’s most controversial contemporary artistS
Ai Weiwei is not only one of China’s most controversial contemporary artists, but also an influential architect, curator, and blogger. He has had over 50 architectural projects in China, including the “Bird’s Nest” in Beijing, a collaboration with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. Ai, who spent twelve years in the United States, is deeply influenced by Western modernists like Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Subversion, appropriation, juxtaposition, satire, and the ready-made are some of the strategies he uses in his installations. -
The Western woman in a Chinese dress
Marion Patten (1889-1941) was an American female artist. One of her celebrated works is considered "A portrait of a woman in Chinese dress" (oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5cm) A native of Malden, Massachusetts, she came to painting at the age of thirty-nine while summering in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1928. Her immediate interest in oil was encouraged there under the instruction of George Elmer Browne (1871-1946) of New York. After her season in Provincetown, she enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston where she studied painting and figure drawing under Philip Hale (1865-1931). A native of Malden, Massachusetts,
The woman who painted the Chinese Empress
Katharine A. Carl (1865 – 1938) paintings have been exhibited at Paris Salon, later her works were displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago - both in the so-called Fine Arts Palace and in the Women’s Building. Possessing herself as a portraitist and working by commissions of the aristocratic clientele, including Algerian and Egyptian royals, as well as American upper classes, paved her the way to the Chinese court. Her brother was an American government official, operating in the high classes in China, who had previously arranged Katharine’s visit to Shanghai, and was familiar with the wife of the
The Chinese Figurine in the American interioR
The American artist William M. Paxton (1869-1941), considered old-fashioned by some modernists, was a prominent genre and portrait painter in the Beaux-Arts style. The Figurine, 1921, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design, 1951.10.8 The Figurine illustrates the vogue for Asian decorative wares that informed American collecting tastes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, a Chinese blue-and-white jar is shown alongside a Chinese figurine; a maid delicately cleans the glass encasing the figurine. Paxton’s compositions often portray women in beautiful interiors. The light source from the left highlighting
Chinese nobles in oil paintings of the Dutch-American artist
The Dutch-American artist Hubert Vos (1855 - 1935) has graduated from Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and has been exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dresden, and Munich. He became famous for portraying the Dowager Empress of China- Cixi in the early 1900s. He extensively traveled and made a trip to China in the year 1899, a few months before the Boxer Rebellion began. During this visit, Vos sought permission to paint the empress dowager and her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, but he was unsuccessful, supposedly because of the prevailing anti-foreign flows all across China. Nonetheless, he selected a variety