Wen C. Fong, Asian historian, dies at 88
Wen C. Fong, a renowned scholar who helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York build one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian art, died on Oct. 1 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 88.
His wife, Constance Tang Fong, said the cause was leukemia.
A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology.
Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of Asian art, including masterworks from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India, and add the space to display it.
He counseled art collectors and philanthropists like Brooke Astor and Arthur M. Sackler, and persuaded the Met’s director at the time, Thomas Hoving, and the president of its board of trustees, the financier C. Douglas Dillon, to acquire a trove of ancient and modern art works from leading American collectors of Asian art, including C.C. Wang and John M. Crawford Jr.
Those efforts brought to the Met an enviable collection of Asian art—hanging scrolls, ancient bronzes, silk tapestries, Chinese paintings dating to the eighth century and more.
An immigrant who came to the United States at age 18, on the eve of the Communist takeover in China, Fong earned a Ph.D. at Princeton and then gained a reputation for being an empire builder, first at the Princeton University Art Museum and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He educated and mentored a generation of Chinese art scholars, many of them now in posts at leading U.S. universities and art museums. He curated some of the biggest exhibitions of Asian art at the Met, including, “Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei” in 1996 and “The Great Bronze Age of China.”
He also wrote, edited or contributed to more than a dozen books about Chinese art, including his seminal work, “Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th-14th Century.”
Wen Fong was born on Dec. 9, 1930, in Shanghai. His father owned a dry goods store. Wen took to art as a boy, and age 10 he was giving public exhibitions of his calligraphy.