Program

As part of its mission, the Foundation will maintain a Public Collection or contemporary ink artworks for the use and benefit of the public. The core of the Foundation’s Public Collection was made possible by a generous donation of artworks from the estate of the artist Li Huasheng (1944 – 2018). Li Huasheng was one of the most important contemporary ink artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the donated works—which cover the entire span of his almost fifty-year career—is the largest, most comprehensive repository of his artworks in the world.

Physical and digital access to artworks in the Collection will be provided to scholars and academics for the purposes of research and teaching. In addition, artworks in the Collection will be available to museums, universities, art schools and other public institutions through both short-term loans of less than a year and long-term loans of more than a year. The Foundation will build its Public Collection primarily through charitable donation. All artworks in the Foundation's Collection are photographed, researched and catalogued, restored and or remounted to stabilize their condition, properly stored in environmentally-controlled conditions appropriate for long-term conservation, and then made accessible to scholars, institutions and the public through the Foundation’s online database and through its research, exhibition, publishing and art-lending programs.

Art made with brush, water, ink and paper has a two-thousand-year-long history in East Asia. The value of contemporary ink art today lies in its ability to bridge divisions between historical art and contemporary art and between Eastern art and Western art. Scholarship is the way in which we establish shared knowledge in modern societies and contemporary ink art enables two different and separate fields of scholarship—the study of East Asian art history and the study of contemporary international art—to collaborate on new research that bridges our understanding of historical and contemporary art practices and Eastern and Western systems of art and meaning. Toward this public purpose, the Foundation supports scholarly research on contemporary ink art through two activities: (1) Field Meetings, specifically, cross-disciplinary academic meetings between East Asian art historians and contemporary art curators and critics on the topic of contemporary ink art; and (2) Individual Research, specifically, scholarly research and writing by individual scholars and curators on topics related to contemporary ink art practice. The goals of both the field meetings and individual research is to support scholarship that leads to new knowledge creation.

The Foundation’s first Field Meeting took place in September of 2021 in the San Francisco Bay Area convened scholars and curators from East Asian art history and contemporary visual art studies to view selections from the Foundation’s Public Collection. The objective of this first Field Meeting was to analyze the artworks of Li Huasheng in the Foundation’s Collection, to stimulate scholarly exchange between the participating scholars, and to initiate new research on Li Huasheng’s artistic practice and or on contemporary ink art more generally.

Sponsoring and organizing exhibitions of contemporary ink art at public venues such as public museums, university art galleries, and art fairs and biennials, is the primary means by which the Foundation can provide the general public with direct physical access and exposure to important works of contemporary ink art. The Foundation will support Public Exhibitions through two activities: (1) the sponsorship of exhibitions of contemporary ink art by qualified public benefit institutions such as museums and universities; and (2) the direct organization of exhibitions of contemporary ink art in collaboration with qualified public benefit institutions. In order to reach the broadest possible public audience with its exhibition activities, the Foundation will support whenever possible traveling the exhibitions it either sponsors or directly organizes to multiple public venues.

Organized in collaboration with a public institution such as a museum or a university, the Foundation’s first exhibition will be a solo retrospective of the artist Li Huasheng selected largely but not exclusively from artworks donated by the artist’s estate to the Foundation. The exhibition with be co-organized by the Foundation in collaboration with a qualified pubic benefit  institution and will  travel to additional public venues across the United States, Europe, Greater China and East Asia. 

If new knowledge is created through scholarly research, then that knowledge is most broadly shared with the public through the publication of books and other media such as journal papers, magazines articles, and video documentaries, amongst others. Furthermore, if exhibitions give the general public physical access to important works of art, then publication supports and extends this experience with ideas and context provided by new scholarly research. In this way, publication activities complement and extend the scholarly research and the public exhibition programs of the Foundation while deepening their social impact. The Foundation supports publication on contemporary ink art either indirectly through financial sponsorship or directly through publishing itself. The Foundation supports both physical and digital publication and dissemination of content in the following formats: (1) monographs on a single artist or topic; (2) magazine or journal articles; (3) artist interviews; (4) exhibition catalogs; (5) collections or anthologies of journal articles; and (6) video documentaries.

The Foundation’s first publication will be a monograph authored by Dr. Britta Erickson on the artistic career of Li Huasheng  to accompany the solo retrospective exhibition currently being organized by the Foundation. The Foundation's second publication will be multi-volume Catalogue Raisonné beginning with Li Huasheng's grid and line paintings and followed by separate volumes on his abstract landscapes and contemporary landscapes, his Sichuan and traditional landscapes, his calligraphy and bird and flower paintings, and his photography.