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

Widely acclaimed as China’s foremost twentieth 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. Directed by San Francisco State University's Cinema professor, Weimin Zhang, the 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.

Of Color and Ink received two awards: Winner Best International Feature Documentary Film Award at The 47th Sao Paulo International Film Festival and Winner Best Feature Documentary Film Award at The China (Guangzhou) International Documentary Film Festival.

Join us for a film screening and discussion of the film.

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.
• 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.

The event is free, but RSVP is required. Please reserve here.