The Chinese Cultural Center at San Diego State University held the grand opening of its “Ancestral Mountain” art exhibition on March 30, featuring over 60 works by artist Yu Chunming. The center also had a Traditional Chinese Painting Workshop on April 22 where students and faculty could learn basic Chinese watercolor painting with rice paper.
The opening ceremony saw more than 100 attendees, where Chunming presented a speech on his artistic journey and the inspiration behind many of his paintings.
According to a press release by the center, attendees included the founder of “Beyond” Culture in Los Angeles, the Dean of the Professional Studies & Fine Arts at San Diego State University, the Director of the San Diego Museum of Art, the Dean of the SDSU Photography Department and several other local artists and faculty members.
Chunming is a member of the China Artists Association, the American Watercolor Society and the American Oil Painters Association. Many of the works displayed in the exhibition were created by him during the COVID-19 pandemic and feature themes symbolizing this time period.
“During the opening reception, he mentioned that probably the majority of the paintings that are shown here were done during COVID when he was at home,” Mu-Ting Huang, Program Director for the center, said. “So he had a lot of time at home to think about life, the meaning of life and also other things that could have stimulated his thinking.”
His other themes include creating breaking points in the middle of his paintings with a bridge to symbolize their need to understand each other, collectivism, hope through light at the end of a tunnel, metamorphosis and more.
“San Diego State, we are really looking for all types of arts with universal themes and I think his themes are universal,” Li-Rong Lilly Cheng, director of the Chinese Cultural Center, said.
Many of Chunming’s works on display also feature traditional Chinese houses with the intent of keeping their structural style intact for the future, as social changes cause them to disappear. This way, these representations of Chinese culture can be preserved.
“He spent ten long years painting the villages, the houses, the landscapes and bricks and mortar of bygone days,” Cheng said in an explanatory booklet on the exhibit. “He knows that time may destroy some buildings and changes may alter the lifestyles of villages, he has done his best to capture a moment in time.”
According to Huang, setting up the exhibition took around a week as the center worked with new custom dividers from San Francisco to make the best use of the limited space available to display as many paintings as they could.
“He (Chunming) felt very happy to be able to do such a large exhibition, here at San Diego State,” Cheng said. “He actually came and he did the installation and he explained to us all the paintings.”
The exhibit is planned to remain on display for all SDSU students and faculty until September 30. In the future, the center hopes to bring another exhibit on the China Burma India Theater experience during World War Two.
“Students and faculty, we would like to invite every person to come in,” Cheng said. “This place is not visited a lot. We don’t get a lot of foot traffic. We would hope that when we do something like this, that more students and faculty and community will benefit from such an enormous exhibition.”
