The Tang Center at 25

In celebration of the Princeton University Art Museum’s new Huo Pavilion of Asian Art, the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art’s 25th anniversary, and the decades of scholarship on Asian art at Princeton University, the Tang Center and the Museum are hosting a conversation with world-renowned artist Xu Bing on Thursday, April 9, and a two-day international symposium on Friday, April 10–Saturday, April 11, featuring twenty scholars who will give presentations that build upon and expand Princeton’s tradition of scholarship on Asian art.

To commemorate the longstanding commitment and partnership between the Tang Center and the Museum, we reshare this excerpt from “The Tang Center at 20,” authored by Dora C. Y. Ching, executive director of the Tang Center, on the occasion of the Center’s 20th anniversary in 2021.

Created in the 2001–2002 academic year to build on Princeton University’s history of excellence in the field of East Asian art history, the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art quickly transformed from a fledgling entity into a dynamic force. The Tang Center initially defined its mission as “sponsoring and facilitating scholarly exchange by bringing together scholars, students, and the general public through interdisciplinary and innovative programs, including lectures and colloquia, publications, graduate education, museum development, and exhibitions.” This publication commemorating the Tang Center at the twenty-year mark records a prodigious amount of scholarly activity: eighty-one stand-alone lectures, eight multipart lecture series, nineteen workshops, four panel discussions, one webinar, seven graduate student symposia, fourteen international symposia, forty-nine art acquisitions, four exhibitions, and fifteen publications. With a staff of only two—a faculty director and an associate director—the sheer numbers are impressive, but they tell only a part of the story. The mission statement and the enumeration of two decades of activities understate the Tang Center’s true contribution: the sustained creation of opportunities for intellectual exchange and rigorous research on East Asian art.

Over the years, the Tang Center has created a network of scholars in East Asian art, mentored graduate students, and made lasting contributions through its programs, museum activities, and publications. With imagination and energy, the Tang Center has thus developed into a vibrant locus of research and academic programs that shape future scholarship.

Campus Collaborations

Collaboration with other Princeton entities has always played a key role for the Tang Center. In the early years, when it resembled a small start-up with limited resources and experience, teaming up with others enabled the Center to work on larger projects and reach wider audiences than would have been possible otherwise. The Tang Center soon identified natural collaborators on campus, the Princeton University Art Museum and the East Asian Studies Program foremost among many. For its dedication, held in February 2002, the Center initiated and contributed toward the acquisition of Book from the Sky, a boxed set of four hand-printed volumes by the artist Xu Bing. This acquisition was beyond the reach of the Tang Center alone but became possible with the support of the museum and the East Asian Studies Program. Book from the Sky became the centerpiece of an exhibition in the Art Museum and the focus of the Center’s first symposium and publication, Persistence / Transformation: Text and Image in the Art of Xu Bing. Furthermore, beginning with this inaugural symposium, the Tang Center has intentionally included scholars from different disciplines or geographical areas. In addition to specialists in East Asian art, an expert in Chinese intellectual dissidence and literature and an art historian of Western contemporary art participated in Persistence / Transformation. Many Tang Center projects aim for multidisciplinary and cross-field-interaction.

Since its inauguration, the Tang Center has endeavored to participate in a range of museum activities. In the spirit of collaboration, and with the precedent set by Book from the Sky, the Center has regularly contributed to acquisitions for the Princeton University Art Museum. These acquisitions, all of which are published in this volume, enhance the museum’s collection of East Asian art and create unique opportunities for teaching. 

Collaboration is thus ingrained in the Tang Center’s DNA. The Center looks forward to new collaborative possibilities and appreciates its many partners at Princeton: the Princeton University Art Museum; the Departments of Art and Archaeology, East Asian Studies, Music, and Religion; the Buddhist Studies Workshop; the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion; the Humanities Council; the Office of Alumni Affairs; and the Princeton University Library.

Outside Partnerships

The Tang Center also forms partnerships beyond Princeton, with both domestic and international institutions. Though expanding, the field of East Asian art remains relatively close knit; scholars interested in similar topics often know one another and frequently work together. Partnerships thus arose naturally for some of the Center’s projects. For instance, the tea-leaf storage jar named Chigusa inspired a partnership between the Freer Gallery of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Tang Center. The pricncipal scholars, Andrew M. Watsky and Louise Allison Cort (Freer|Sackler), were long-time colleagues and experts in th earts of tea in Japan. When the Freer acquired Chigusa, both Watsky and Cort recognized and pursued the opportunity to exhibit Chigusa at Princeton (in addition to its exhibition in Washington). Cary Y. Liu and Zoe!S. Kwok formed the curatorial team at the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Tang Center contributed to the exhibition and organized a scholarly symposium; the symposium papers were published as Around Chigusa: Tea and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan (2017).

International partnerships based on scholarly exchange have been equally enriching. Without any official agreement, the Tang Center and the Dunhuang Academy in China have enjoyed a highly productive, collegial partnership that made possible the nine-volume publication Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves (2021). Zhao Shengliang, Ph.D, then deputy director of the Dunhuang Academy, came to Princeton as a visiting scholar in 2010, spending six months researching the Lo Archive photographs of the Dunhuang cave sites. In June 2019, Zhao and Lu Shuaiyang, also from the Dunhuang Academy, came to Princeton as short-term researchers. In reciprocal visits, two teams from Princeton traveled to Dunhuang, in 2010 and 2015, to conduct on-site research. At present, even after the completion of this project in 2021, the Dunhuang Academy and the Tang Center continue to nurture their relationship, promising future exchange. Similarly, in 2019 Kwun Nam (Phil) Chan, Ph.D., a research-assistant curator at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Art Museum, came to Princeton as a J.S. Lee memorial Fellow to conduct research on works in the Princeton University Art Museum. Other visiting scholars have included Zhang Changpin, Ph.D., from the Hubei Provincial Institute of Archaology and Cultural Relics in Wuhan, who researched topics in archaeology in 2007–2008, and Tan Shugguan, Ph.D, from Zhejiang University, who served as research assistant in 2013 and 2014 for the publication Art as History: Calligraphy and Painting as One. The Tang Center welcomes such partnerships, which contribute to the intellectual life at Princeton and beyond.