Category: Fine Arts, China
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The Institute's collection of Asian art represents seventeen Asian cultures spanning over 5,000 years. The Department of Asian Arts has benefited greatly from generous gifts from knowledgeable collectors. Augustus L. Searle, Alfred F. Pillsbury, Richard P. Gale, Louis W. Hill, Jr., and Ruth and Bruce Dayton have donated specialized collections of international reputation, including ancient Chinese bronzes, ancient and post-Sung jade, Chinese monochrome ceramics, Ukiyo-e paintings, Japanese prints, and classical Chinese furniture. In addition, highly regarded specialized collections of Ch'ing dynasty silk textiles, Miao textiles, and surimono prints have been built over the years. The curatorial department's goal is to provide the public with a broad overview of Asian art.
About the Collection In September 2005, UW-Madison Professor Emeritus Tse-Tsung Chow (who died in 2007) and his wife Nancy Wu Chow donated over 120 calligraphic and painted Chinese scrolls and fans, ranging from the 18th through the 20th centuries, to the Special Collections Department of the UWM Libraries. Professor Chow's collection is an invaluable addition to Special Collections, offering primary examples of Chinese culture spanning a two-hundred year period, with didactic applications in a broad range of disciplines at UWM, including art, art history, history, geography, foreign languages and linguistics, and international studies.
The East Asian Library's Collection The East Asian Library of the University of California, Berkeley has 2,700 Chinese rubbings, second in number among collections outside East Asia only to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The nucleus of the collection, over half of the items, was acquired in 1950 from the estate of Mitsui Soken, a wealthy Japanese bibliophile, and includes albums of rubbings once owned by noted Chinese connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. Other important acquisitions were made through purchases from Chinese scholars and dealers and through the bequest of Professor Woodbridge Bingham's collection. The library's holdings are especially rich in albums of models of calligraphy and bronze inscriptions.
