February 3 - March 29, 2025
From the Gallery at UTA:
“The Gallery at UTA is pleased to present an exhibition that explores how we raise awareness about and characterize the artwork of conflicted artists of the Asian diaspora who never produced overt “conflict art.” This traveling exhibition features three little-researched diasporic painters — Chao Shao-an (1905-1998), Keisho Okayama (1934-2018), and Ann Phong (1957-) — brought together through their unusual approaches to painting shared experiences of conflict in Asia.
Curated by Dr. Fletcher Coleman, Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Texas at Arlington, with an exhibition catalogue produced by Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd., the exhibition showcases painters whose lives were fundamentally shaped by major conflicts of the twentieth century who reflected on their circumstances through oblique and innovative methods.
The first artist, Chao Shao-an is an internationally recognized Hong Kong ink painter who shaped modernist approaches to Chinese ink painting through his development of the Lingnan School of Painting. Surviving all twentieth century conflicts in China, from the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 to the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Chao Shao-an ruminated on these events through the metaphorical subject matter of bird-and-flower painting. This exhibition highlights Chao’s work as an innovative modernist who advanced the expressive possibilities of ink painting and subtly reflected on his biography within an otherwise staid genre.
The second artist, Keisho Okayama, was the son of Rev. Zenkai Okayama, who became the second-highest ranking priest of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism in the United States. The artist’s ethnicity and his father’s influential position led to the family’s incarceration within the Japanese camp at Topaz, Utah, for the duration of World War II. Okayama was deeply affected by his camp experiences, as well as his father’s later alienation from the Buddhist church. He studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, subsequently producing work as an independent painter over a fifty-year period in Los Angeles. Despite the remarkable, often monumentally sized paintings that he produced, Okayama remained little-known during his lifetime and never exhibited beyond the greater West Coast. Since beginning work on this exhibition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Cantor Museum at Stanford University have acquired his works, and he has begun to be recognized in the increasingly prominent discourse concerning Japanese and Japanese American artists whose work was impacted by their World War II incarceration. The final artist, Ann Phong (1957-), is a Vietnamese American painter whose work reflects on her escape from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, as well as the intergenerational immigrant experiences of the Vietnamese diasporic community in the United States. Her recent series of paintings also tackle the localized effects of pressing global issues such as climate change on both Vietnamese and American communities.
Dr. August Jordan Davis, Chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Director of The Gallery at UTA stated, “We are proud to bring this unique exhibition to The Gallery at UTA. Dr. Coleman has curated an original conversation between three artists who each in their own way brought unexpected expressions of the momentous events of their lives and eras into their artworks. What Dr. Coleman’s curation and catalog essay provide is a way for us to better understand not only these moments in history, but the transformative perspective artists bring to such times.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, Dr. Yukio Lippit, the Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, will present a gallery talk on Thursday, February 6 from 4 – 5 pm. There also will be a reception on Friday, February 7 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm with brief remarks at 6:30 pm. The exhibition, talk and reception are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 am – 5 pm and 12 – 5 pm on Saturdays. Please note: the gallery is closed during Spring Break, March 10 – 16, 2025. The Gallery at UTA is in room 169 of the Fine Arts Building, 502 S. Cooper St, Arlington, TX. For more information, contact Dr. August Jordan Davis (817) 272-2891 or Patricia Healy (817) 272-5658 or visit the gallery website https://thegallery.uta.edu.”
Reception: February 7, 2025 | 5:30–7:30 pm
2143 Westheimer Road
Houston, 77098 TX
(713) 521-7500
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