When MFA Chinese art curator Dr. Nancy Berliner met Wan-go Weng, a prominent art collector, in a Shanghai library in the 1980s, she couldn’t have known the relationship would bear so much fruit, and that their friendship would continue on for over 25 years.
Last month, Wan-go Weng, also a noted artist and calligrapher, celebrated his 100th birthday, and he did so in a quite unusual fashion: rather than receive presents, he gave one. Weng donated a more than 300-year-old painting to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The 53-foot-long scroll painting by Wang Hui, titled “10,000 Miles Along the Yangtze River”, has been in his family for five generations.
“I just feel I have learned so much from Wan-go. I’m so grateful to him…he’s so generous, not only with his art, but with his knowledge.” Berliner said.
Weng’s great great grandfather, Tong-he Weng, acquired the painting over a century ago. His great grandfather wrote in his journal about how excited he was to have it, that he didn’t want to let it out of his sight. The painter Hui, is considered the greatest painter of the Qing dynasty, Dr. Berliner said, and the painting is of particular importance to the Weng family because their family and Wang Hui are both from Changshu, north of Suzhou.
Weng has donated many other Qing works over the years, Dr. Berliner said. He and she have talked about how the MFA Chinese art collection has been “so strong in the Song and Yuan dynasties, but not as strong in the Ming and Qing dynasty works,” noting the impact of Weng’s donation.
“We spent a lot of time looking at paintings in the MFA collection,” Dr. Berliner said of Weng. “He loves looking at masterworks very very closely.”
A native of Boston, Dr. Berliner has a long history with Chinese culture, Chinese art, art, and art history. She is fluent in Chinese, once lived in China for more than six years, and has made numerous shorter and longer trips.
She started her career as an artist, but her interest in Chinese culture, Chinese art, and art history grew out of college. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, graduating in 1979. Her first shorter trip to China was to Taiwan in 1977. After graduating she moved to Hong Kong in 1980, then to Beijing in 1982 where she completed additional studies at the Central Academy of Art.
In 1997 she ran her first exhibit at the MFA: a 16th and 17th century Chinese furniture gallery. The gallery was immersive—you could experience the furniture as if you were really using it—and ran for over 20 years at the MFA.
“I thought it was important to see the furniture in context,” Dr. Berliner said. “You can just look at the form of a piece of furniture, but it has so much more meaning when you think that [it] is actually made for a room, that’s it made for people to sit on.”
This interest in having a physical space for visitors to experience Chinese culture is something that drew her to her most notable project, the Yin Yu Tang house, which opened in 2003.
The house is a late 18th-century Chinese house from Anhui province that had been removed from its original village and re-erected in Salem, MA, at the Peabody Essex Museum. The five-bay, two-story residence was typical of its region, built of timber frame construction, with a tile roof and exterior masonry walls of sandstone and brick. In addition to sixteen bedrooms there are also two reception areas, a storage room, and a courtyard in the center.
“It was all very serendipitous,” Dr. Berliner said about the story of how the project came to be. While traveling around from village to village in China, looking for vernacular Chinese art, furniture and architecture, Dr. Berliner discovered the house.
“It happened that when I was in this one village, I arrived there the same day that the family all gathered there and decided to sell their house, and they jokingly asked me if I wanted to buy the house.” She bought the house and then spent over 7 years getting it to Salem.
The issues with transporting the house were nearly all physical, not political. “We worked very closely with the local, state, and national government. In terms of permissions, it became a cultural exchange project. So that wasn’t difficult.”
First they dismantled the house into pieces, and numbered and organized them all so it could be put back together. Then they had to put the pieces into crates and ship them from the local village to container ships. After that the pieces came across the ocean by boat. They spent 5 years in a warehouse in the US doing the remainder of the work.
Since visitors of the museum were physically going to move around inside the house, they had to be concerned with safety. “We had to do tests to make sure it would stand up against snow…. We had to worry about earthquakes. We had to do a lot of repairs to make sure it was structurally sound.”
In North America, The Yin Yu Tang house is the only example of historic Chinese vernacular architecture. It is representative of the type of home an average family in China would have lived in.
“So often in American museums you only see art of the elite, but it’s such a small percentage of people,” Dr. Berliner said. “It’s important for people to understand how the lao bai xing live in China.”
After working on the Yin Yu Tang house for many years, Dr. Berliner returned to the MFA in 2012, curating Chinese paintings and sculptures.
The MFA is home to the “earliest Asian art collection in America”, Dr. Berliner said. The history of Asian art at the MFA is a fascinating story.
Edward Morse, an American scientist, went to Japan in 1877 to investigate brachiopods, and then convinced two other Americans, an art historian and a physician, to join him there. Japan had opened up to the new world just two decades before, in 1853, when Commodore Perry arrived in Tokyo bay, so Americans were then able to visit and explore Japanese culture for the first time.
The three of them fell in love with the idea of Old Japan, which they thought was possibly about to become extinct. Their acquisitions created the core of the MFA’s Asian collection and also inspired future advocacy on behalf of Asian art and culture more generally. Some of their acquisitions included Chinese art that was in Japan at that time, many pieces from the Song and Yuan dynasties.
Other acquisitions were made during the early 20th century. “The Qing dynasty was falling apart at that time, so many collections were coming on the market,” Dr. Berliner said. “So some of the art was purchased from Japan, and some came from China.”
Chinese culture is “endlessly intriguing,” Dr. Berliner said. “Song is a sort of golden era of Chinese art and aesthetics,” Dr. Berliner said. The Song and Yuan paintings are “so pure, refined, and wonderful”. In addition to the Song era, Dr. Berliner is fascinated by Chinese language and poetry.
Dr. Berliner has a Chinese name, which was given to her by a poet she met while studying in China. It is no coincidence that Chinese language and poetry are extremely interesting to her as well.
“The concept of calligraphy and painting being so intertwined…and poetry and painting and words…it’s a very wonderful and full and rich concept of what an art object can be. It’s an abstraction that, even though it’s abstracted, is also very rich with meaning.”
It’s no surprise then that she would befriend the now 100-year-old famous Chinese calligrapher and art collector Wan-go Weng.