Film Screening and Panel Discussion: Of Color & Ink: Chang Dai-chien After 1949

Widely acclaimed as China’s foremost 20 th century painter, Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) spent his last three decades living in self-imposed exile from his beloved homeland. This film unravels the mystery and controversy of his creative and spiritual quest abroad and his journey East to West to become an artist of global significance.“Of Color and Ink” is a feature-length documentary that follows the journey of the Chinese artist Chang Dai-chien as he embarks on a quest from the East to the West in search of the Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian place of life and the ultimate truth of art. The film delves into Chang’s extraordinary exile journey and sheds light on his mission in the global art world.

From CINEQUEST:

Winner Best International Feature Documentary Film Award at The 47th Sao Paulo International Film Festival

Winner Best Feature Documentary Film Award at The China (Guangzhou) International Documentary Film Festival

The wonderful Of Color and Ink uncovers the creative, political, and spiritual journeys of China’s foremost 20th-century painter Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983). The film follows his unusual life journey from pre-Communist China to Argentina, the jungles of Brazil; his much acclaimed exhibits in Paris and Germany in the 1960s; as well as his final years in California and Taiwan, in a thirty-year exile in the West that has been shrouded in mystery.

Director Zhang Weimin’s captivating film explores Chang Dai-chien’s pursuit of a vision of Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian ideal of harmony and tolerance, in a world far removed from the traditional China he left behind, as he moved from East to West to become the first Chinese artist to achieve international renown, whose works today command the highest auction prices of any of any post World War II painter.

Through innovative techniques and visual styles, “Of Color and Ink” spectacularly offers an illuminating, refreshing, artistic, and entertaining exploration of an emblematic influential figure in 20th century art.

Panelists:

Weimin Zhang is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer, and professor at San Francisco State University. As one of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers, she worked on numerous award-winning films, documentaries, and TV drama series in both China and the U.S. as a director, cinematographer, and editor. Her film, The House of Spirit (2000) won the Women in Film Award; She also produced, wrote, and directed the feature documentary Missing Home: The Last Days of Beijing Hutongs (2013) which was presented at more than a dozen international film festivals. In 2007, the Library of Congress acquired her interactive multimedia DVD-ROM, Nushu: The Women’s Secret Writing for its permanent collection.

Mark Dean Johnson is a professor of art. He was educated at Yale University, where he was a personal assistant to Josef Albers, and received his M.F.A. from UC Berkeley. He previously was a professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, and associate dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute. His publications include Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008: Stanford University Press), and AT WORK: The Art of California Labor (2003: California Historical Society Press).

Carl Nagin has worked as an editor, teacher, and independent journalist in print and documentaries for four decades. His features have appeared in The New Yorker, Art and Antiques, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC World, and New York magazine. He wrote and reported documentaries for the PBS series FRONTLINE, the BBC, and ABC News. At Harvard University, he taught writing, rhetoric, and journalism, and served as a speechwriter, editor, and researcher for Joseph Nye, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. A three-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work on Chang Dai-ch’ien, he is completing the artist’s first English-language biography and produced the 1993 documentary Abode of Illusion: The Art and Life of Chang Dai-ch’ien. For the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he served as chief editor for the award-winning catalogue, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1000 Years of Chinese Painting and for Masterpieces of Chinese Painting: Tang, Sung, and Yuan Dynasties published by Otsuka Kogeisha. He currently serves as a Professor of Humanities and Sciences at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Jun Hu is an assistant professor; Mr. & Mrs. Pai Ruchu Presidential Professor in Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He specializes in Chinese art and architecture, with an emphasis on how the material process of art-making intersects with other modes of knowledge production. His research and teaching engage with the history of Chinese architecture and its connections to other scholarly traditions, print culture and painting theory in the early modern period, and interregional interactions between China, Japan, and Korea.

Winnie Wong is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research is concerned with the history and present of artistic authorship, with a focus on interactions between China and the West. Her theoretical interests revolve around the critical distinctions of high and low, true and fake, art and commodity, originality and imitation, and, conceptual and manual labor, and thus her work focuses on objects and practices at the boundary of these categories. 

Admission Information:

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Contact Info:

ccs@berkeley.edu

Access Coordinator: Xiaojie Ma, ccs@berkeley.edu, 5106436321