Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellowship
Wong Chai Lok is a renowned Chinese calligrapher and educator whose work has been exhibited at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. A fund established in his name occasionally awards a fellowship to a calligrapher of outstanding merit to exhibit their work and provide an artist's residency at Cornell.
2025 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow
Wang Tiande
Celebrated for his revolutionary takes on traditional Chinese art in China and abroad, Wang Tiande is best known for his burned landscapes, consisting of a painted underlayer and an overlayer burned with cigarettes or incense sticks. More recently, he has incorporated landscape rubbings of famous ancient steles from his own collection. In their fusion of the fleeting and the timeless, Wang Tiande’s works meditate on creation and destruction. They are both elegies to the past and celebrations of its present persistence.
Wang's exhibit will be on view from April 8, 2025 to July 20, 2025 in the Johnson Museum’s fifth-floor Rockwell Gallery. Please also save the following dates during the exhibit opening week:
Artist’s Talk: Wang Tiande
Thursday, Apr 10, 2025
5:15-7PM / Robinson Lecture Hall, Johnson Museum of Art
Event details here
Calligraphy Demonstration with Wang Tiande
Friday, Apr 11, 2025
2:30PM / Hirsch Lecture Lobby, Johnson Museum of Art
Event details here
Past Fellows:
2020 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow
Tong Yang-Tze
Tong Yang-Tze was the 2020 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow. During a career spanning four decades, Yangtze has received critical acclaim for her large-scale and unrestrained cursive script. Yang-Tze's Immortal at the River was exhibited for the first time in the United States at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on campus.
The subject of this 54-meter-long calligraphic work is the poem by the same name by Yang Shen (1488–1559) that forms the preface to the standard edition of the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San guo yan yi). View the entire scroll.
The exhibition, which garnered positive reviews and media coverage, was curated by An-yi Pan, associate professor of the history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Ellen Avril, chief curator and curator of Asian art at the Johnson Museum.
Professor An-Yi Pan also wrote the text for the exhibition's catalog which can be ordered through the Herbert F. Johnson Museum's publications page.
Her calligraphy video series, "SAO" was integrated into this year's Locally Grown Dance Concert as part of the piece titled "Atelier 320: Upending." Enjoy an excerpt of that dance piece.