USC Pacific Asia Museum - The Charles T. Townley Collection

THE CHARLES T. TOWNLEY COLLECTION

COLLECTOR’S STATEMENT FROM DR. CHARLES T. TOWNLEY

My interest in contemporary Chinese art began with the purchase of a collage by Tang Guo at the Shanghart Gallery in 1996. I was in China attending a professional conference and visiting ex-pat friends who were living in Shanghai’s prestigious Portman Hotel Apartments. While in the hotel lobby, I saw about ten Tang Guo collages on a 60-foot wall that served as Shanghart’s sole gallery and the only contemporary gallery in Shanghai. I wanted to take home a nice, non-touristy object and decided the Tang Guo collage was it. Following some confusion at the front desk, the Shanghart director, Lorenz Helbling, was located and appeared. After a brief discussion, I made the purchase and went back to New Mexico to hang it on my dining room wall never expecting what would follow.

I was fortunate to receive a Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Beijing Normal University in 1999. A persistent collector of antiques and art, I began to explore the Beijing art scene, liked what I saw, and started collecting Quickly, I came to understand that contemporary art is an integral part of the social fabric of China. After the 1989 Tiananmen riots decimated the intellectual community, contemporary popular and fine art became major vehicles for advocating progressive change in Chinese society. Some artists documented social and political injustice and provided leadership for change. Sheng Qi, for example, took on government repression with his paintings like “Tiananmen Recollections in the Evening.” Zhang Dali led Beijing rent strikes and neighborhood preservation efforts, while carving or spray painting his iconic images in the ruins of reconstruction such as “Beijing Toilet.” My growing enthusiasm included attending art performances often in basements, fields, and halffinished buildings. I loved the experiential, slightly subversive nature of it all. This dynamic relationship between art and society is something that I could understand as a result of practicing my profession in American Indigenous communities where this relationship is very important. In the beginning, this relationship between art and society was the main driver of my collecting efforts.

However, contemporary art in China has many other dimensions. It influences and is influenced by art throughout the world. Sometimes western practices are adopted without significant change. Examples include Aniwar Mamat’s untitled abstracts of Turkic rugs, Tang Ping’s untitled prints, and Jiang Weitao’s “Untitled Work 0812.” At other times, western influences are minor as in Jin Weihong’s “Elated” ink painting and Cui Dezheng’s “Yu Yao Island” woodcut. But most of the time western concepts are modified to address Chinese aesthetics and understanding. Examples include figurative art like Liu Qinghe’s “Swimming,” environmental art like Shi Zhonging’s “Floating Cloud Hut, No.2,” alternate formats like Tan Xiaolei’s video “Belief,” and western schools such as surrealism as seen in Yao Yi’s photograph “Red Shadow No.2,” and pop art like Yu Youhan’s print “Chairman Mao in Discussion with the Peasants of Shaoshan.” While I am not a qualified art scholar in any sense, I came to appreciate and collect works in these areas as well.

During my 1999 Fulbright appointment, I collected work at three galleries in Beijing. Brian Wallace at Red Gate got me started with Su Xinping’s lithograph “Fish Feast” and Tan Ping’s “Untitled” engraving Meg Maggio, then at Courtyard Gallery, provided Shao Keping’s woodblock “Floating to the Future.” And Emily Zhang at Qin Gallery sold me Yu Xiaodon’s “Tibetan Girl” painting. I also travelled frequently to Shanghai to visit friends, always stopping at Shanghart, now a proper gallery operating out of a small building near Fuxing Park in the French Concession. Here I bought more work from Lorenz Helbling including, Wu Yiming’s mysterious ink painting “Woman in Purple” and Zhao Bandi’s satirical photograph “No Smoking” featuring his iconic panda bear.

I was appointed as a visiting professor of information science and higher education at Beijing Normal University at the end of the 1999 Fulbright, a relationship that lasted until 2018. This gave me the opportunity to return to Beijing every two years or so to teach a course. In 2006, I received a second Fulbright at Beijing Normal University and lived there an entire year. In 2010, I co-chaired a Fulbright sponsored international conference on civic education which gave me six more weeks in Beijing. Beginning in 2015, Victor Roberts, my companion, joined me in visiting galleries and studios and selecting art for the collection.

Throughout the 2000 -2020 period, I continued to work with the aforementioned gallerists as well as Christophe Mao at Chambers Fine Art. I also began meeting with individual artists and curators, many of whom, like Sheng Qi and Ai Weiwei, speak excellent English, enhancing my ability to understand the artists, their work and their relationship with Chinese society. I began to collect some works in other media, like Liang Shuo’s “Migrant Worker in the City” maquette, Ding Yi’s “Appearance of Crosses” fan, and Song Hongquan’s “Lotus Seed” sculpture I completed the collection with the purchase of Birdhead Collective’s “Passion Bloom Ambitions” mixed media piece at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2019.

Throughout the 20-year period I spent developing this collection, I witnessed the changing dynamics of the Chinese contemporary art market. Most important has been the growing acceptance of contemporary art by the Chinese urban public. Several years ago, Brian Wallace told me that about half his sales are now going to Chinese nationals, up from near zero in the 1990s. This demonstrates the growing cosmopolitan nature and wealth of Chinese urban residents.

Efforts to make Chinese art conform to government priorities were muted throughout the period between 1989 and 2020. As a result, contemporary art bloomed during this period. However, since Xi Jinping’s 2014 lectures on art, actions to encourage “socialist values” and promote state guidance in art have greatly increased. These changes are apparent to me and others as art addressing politics and progressive social issues is less frequent and western art concepts, with the exception of social realism, are less apparent. I feel truly fortunate to have collected Chinese contemporary art in the period of creativity, openness and experimentation from 1989 to 2020. I hope visitors to the USC Pacific Asia Museum will appreciate and learn from this collection.

FROM USC PACIFIC ASIA MUSEUM

The Charles T. Townley Collection is an important addition to the USC Pacific Asia Museum’s permanent collection, and we are excited to share it with the public in this online format. As we strive to create an inclusive and wide-ranging collection of artworks from across Asia and the Pacific Islands, one of USC PAM’s objectives is to ensure that late 20th and 21st century perspectives are included in both our collection and our galleries. With the addition of the works in the Charles T. Townley Collection, our dedication to the arts of China and to contemporary art are further solidified for generations to come.

USC PAM’s history of commitment to contemporary Chinese art began with the 1987 exhibition Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China and continued with a second exhibition, I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cézanne and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese “New Wave” and “Avant-garde” Art of the Eighties in 1991. Artwork featured in these exhibitions, with many now in the USC PAM permanent collection, highlighted the increased social, cultural, and political change that transpired in the late 1980s as artists embraced intellectual freedoms and looked to global art trends, leaving behind the social realism taught in local academies. New media and an enthusiasm for individual expression have led to the current flourishing of contemporary Chinese artists throughout the world.

The Townley Collection, featuring artworks dating from the 1990s until 2020, picks up where the previous PAM exhibitions left off. Dr. Townley was inspired to collect contemporary Chinese art because of the artists’ multifarious, subversive methods of visualizing their concerns about social and political change. The staggering amount of cultural and environmental change that has transpired in Chinese cities is also reflected in the artwork found in the Townley Collection. Dr. Townley’s interest in representing a diverse range of artists’ perspectives echoes the mission of USC PAM: to inspire encounters with the art, history, and culture of Pacific Asia to promote intercultural understanding in the service of elevating our shared sense of humanity. We are honored to be the home of the Charles T. Townley Collection and we look forward to providing access to these works of art for students, professors, and the public. As a university museum, we find particular appeal in the fact that Dr. Townley’s initial interest in contemporary Chinese art was deeply connected to his experiences as a professor in Beijing and his donation of the collection is intended to serve our university community and beyond.

We want to thank Dr Charles T Townley and Victor T Roberts for their unwavering support of USC PAM and for their attention and generous energy over the years. With the gift of his collection, Dr. Townley has helped to expand representation of contemporary art and voices at USC PAM.

THE CHARLES T. TOWNLEY COLLECTION