The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Rare art from China’s 19th century woman ruler come to U.S.
SANTAANA » For more than a century she has been known as the woman behind the throne, the empress who through skill and circumstance rose from lowly imperial consort to ironfisted ruler of China at a time and in a place when women were believed to have no power at all.
But it turns out Empress Dowager Cixi was much more than that. The 19th century ruler, who consolidated authority through political maneuvering that at times included incarceration and assassination, was also a serious arts patron and even an artist herself, with discerning tastes that helped set the style for traditional Asian art for more than a century.
That side of Cixi comes to the Western world for the first time with Sunday’s unveiling of “Empress Dowager, Cixi: Selections From the Summer Palace.” The wide-ranging collection, never before seen outside China, will remain at the Southern California museum through March 11 before returning to Beijing.
Consisting of more than 100 pieces from the lavish Beijing palace Cixi called home during the final years of her life, “Empress Dowager” includes numerous examples of intricately designed Chinese furniture, porcelain vases and stone carvings, as well as several pieces of Western art, rare in China at the time, that she also collected. Among them are a large oil-on-canvas portrait of herself she commissioned the prominent Dutch artist Hubert Vos to create.
Other Western accoutrements include gifts from visiting dignitaries, among them British silver serving sets, German and Swiss clocks, a marble-topped table from Italy with inlaid stones in the shape of a chessboard and even an Americanbuilt luxury automobile. The latter, a 1901 Duryea touring car, is believed to be the first automobile im- ported into China and as such may have involved the empress in the country’s first automobile accident when her driver is said to have hit a pedestrian.
“We already have a lot of scholarship on who she is and how she ruled China. But this show brings you a different angle,” said exhibition curator Ying- Chen Peng, as she led a recent pre- opening tour of it through the museum that was kicked off by a raucous performance of Chinese lion dancers accompanied by musicians loudly banging gongs cymbals and drums.
“This exhibition seeks to introduce you to this woman as an arts patron, as an architect, as a designer,” the American University art historian said.
That’s an approach that may finally have gotten it to the Western world. Anne Shih, who chairs the museum’s board of directors, noted recently that she spent 10 years trying to persuade the Chinese government to lend Cixi’s art.
The Bowers, tucked away in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Ana, has built an impressive international reputation over the years by hosting exhibitions of priceless, historical, often larger-than-life artworks from Tibet, the Silk Road, the tomb of China’s first emperor and other historic sites.