Presentation, Arrangement and Display- Where Scholar's Rocks and Contemporary Curatorial Trends Converge

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom, and each one will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of this event on Youtube.

L to R: Susan Meyer “Plinth,” Christopher Frost “Floating Bridge Century Sonny”

"Presentation, Arrangement and Display- Where Scholar's Rocks and Contemporary Curatorial Trends Converge"

Monday November 16th @ 5pm with Special guests: Jan Stuart, Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art, National Museum of Asian Art (see her recent online lecture Rocks as Art- A Chinese Tradition), Craig Yee, Founder of Ink Studio in Beijing, with Susan Meyer, and Christopher Frost, featured artists in the show. This talk will focus on the traditional presentation and display of scholars' rocks as a metaphor of current curatorial trends in the field of contemporary art in the USA and the East Asian diaspora.

Jan Stuart is the Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC. Formerly, she was the Keeper of Asia (department head) at the British Museum from 2006 to 2014. Stuart began her career as a curator at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, after holding a Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton and Yale Universities in Chinese art, language, and culture. Her main curatorial focus is on arts from the tenth century forward, with emphasis on ceramics, decorative arts, textiles, and court arts, including paintings. Exhibitions with related publications at the Freer and Sackler include Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644-1912, with Daisy Yiyou Wang, co-organized with the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem) and the Palace Museum (Beijing) in 2018-19. Stuart was awarded the Secretary of the Smithsonian’s Research Prize in 2019 for the catalogue. She is the author of "Where Chinese Art Stands: A History of Display Pedestals for Rocks," pp. 85–108 in Robert Mowry, Worlds Within Worlds: Chinese Scholars’ Rocks, (Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums, 1997).

Craig Yee is a founding Director of Ink Studio, a Beijing-based gallery and experimental art space devoted to documenting and exhibiting China’s leading contemporary ink artists. Mr. Yee’s writing on contemporary ink has appeared in a number of monographs including The Phenomenology of Life (2014), on the semiotics of Huang Zhiyang’s multimedia practice, Impulse, Matter, Form (2014) on the ink abstractions of Zheng Chongbin, and Carving the Unconscious (forthcoming, 2015) on the woodcuts and paintings of Chen Haiyan. Mr. Yee has also played a central editorial role in university and museum research projects on classical and modern Chinese painting including New Songs on Ancient Tunes (2007) at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Selected Masterworks of Modern Chinese Painting: The Tsao Family Collection (2011) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Modern Ink series of monographs on nineteenth and twentieth century Chinese ink painters published by the University of Hawaii Press.

Christopher Frost is a sculptor living and working in Somerville, MA. His work has been exhibited and collected in museums and art institutions throughout the New England area. His indoor and outdoor sculpture is part of many private and corporate collections. He began his education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and then progressed to the Parsons School of Design, and Paris, France. He received a Master’s degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Christopher Frost has been creating sculptures based on an exploration of traditional Chinese Scholar’s Rocks for several years. Scholar’s Rocks are elaborate naturally formed stones and are viewed as reflections of the natural world: contemplative and balanced. Frost’s pieces emerge from these aesthetics and infuse characteristics of contemporary environments. With color, text, scale and a myriad of material clashing together, these artworks are the ancient and the current bumping and bursting, mashed into one.

Susan Meyer makes sculptures, installations and 2-dimensional artworks utilizing hand and digital methods. The works explore the utopian instinct, interweaving landscape and architecture.  Asian scholar’s stones, objects of psychic transport, are also an inspiration, particularly for the smaller sculptures included within Plinth. Based in Hudson, NY,  Meyer has exhibited throughout the US at venues including the Albany International Airport Gallery; the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ; Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY; Albany Institute of History and Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver; Center for Visual Arts in Denver; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Artspace New Haven, CT; and the Islip Art Museum Carriage House, NY. Artist residencies include Sculpture Space, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Ucross and Pilchuck. Meyer is an Associate Professor of Art at The Center for Art and Design of The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.