Center for US-China Arts Exchange

Deng Xiaoping, Chou Wen-chung and the National Committee on US-China Relations. Beijing, China, 1977.

The Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange was established at Columbia University in 1978 as a cultural response to the political rapprochement of the U.S. and the People's Republic of China following a hiatus of thirty years. Founder Chou Wen-chung saw China's re-opening as an opportunity for resurgence of the arts in China. The stated mission of the Center was to stimulate public interest in the arts of both countries to foster mutual respect. The strategy was to initiate systematic exchanges between organizations and individuals that would bring together creative minds from contrasting cultures and would benefit both countries.

Isaac Stern rehearsing with the Central Philharmonic Orchestra in China, 1979.

Shortly after President Nixon made his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Chou visited China for the first time since his departure twenty-six years earlier. China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and communication was restricted, but he managed to meet with old classmates from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and plant the seeds. In 1977, he visited again to give a lecture at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to an audience of cultural leaders and government officials. After his presentation, he proposed the establishment of an arts exchange program between the two countries. Officials put him in touch with Wang Bingnan, director of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a "people-to-people" agency. On the first of October of the following year, Chou signed an agreement with Wang Bingnan and the Center was officially launched.

Three months later, on January 1, 1979, the United States and the People's Republic of China normalized diplomatic relations in an agreement signed by President Jimmy Carter. The Center then began to work directly with the Chinese Ministry of Culture to carry out a range of exchange programs focused mainly on professionals working in urban centers in the visual, literary and performing arts. In 1990, the Center expanded its scope to include programs of cultural and environmental conservation in support of ethnic minorities in rural Yunnan Province.

During the next forty years, the Center carried out exchange programs that ranged from single master classes in music to symphonic performances; interaction between several dancers, to the first performances of Balanchine ballets in China; and poets working with schoolchildren, to a joint Chinese-American PEN writers' symposium and the staging of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in Beijing. [1]

In 2018, the Center completed its role as program designer, facilitator and fundraiser, concluding forty years of exchange work. The Center's archives have been acquired by Columbia University's C.V. Starr East Asian Library and are available to researchers by appointment.

Chou Wen-chung, a composer whose sensitive melding of East and West led to the emergence of contemporary Chinese music, has had an impact on the development of modern music in Asia and in post-colonial cultures. As a music educator based at Columbia University, he nurtured young composers from around the world and trained the first generation of contemporary composers from mainland China. Simultaneously, Chou devoted the last forty years of his life to an unexpected career as cultural ambassador. In 1978, he established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, which organized a range of exchanges between arts professionals of the two countries.[2]

Born in Yantai, China in 1923, Chou Wen-chung came to the United States in 1946 and studied composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston with Nicholas Slonimsky. He moved to New York in 1949 and began private lessons with the French-born composer Edgard Varèse, an eccentric and demanding teacher who became his artistic mentor. The same year Chou completed his first composition, "Landscapes," which is today seen by many as the first composition in music history that is independent of either Western or Eastern music grammar. Written for Western instruments, but inspired by Chinese poetry, "Landscapes" was premiered in 1953 by the San Francisco Symphony orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski, launching the young immigrant onto a promising career. [3]

Chou revealed his goals of cultural diplomacy in 1978 when he established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, collaborating with institutions and professionals in both countries on a range of exchange projects. The Center's program continued for forty years, and its archives have been acquired by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. (See History section.)

The Center's programs supported specialists in all the visual, literary and performing arts. At the time of establishment, three programmatic categories were announced: exchanges of materials, exchanges of specialists and clearinghouse services.

Arthur Miller, Chou Wen-Chung, and Cao Yu at Columbia University, 1980.

In 1979, China's sudden accessibility to American visitors sparked interest in the arts world. Once the opening of the Center was announced, the office received requests from both the general public as well as from many distinguished artists and cultural figures who wanted to be among the first to go. At a time when few people were able to make arrangements on their own, the Center took on the role of organizing exchanges in the arts with China.

During the first few years of operation, the Center accommodated many requests from artists who wanted to travel to China. In 1979, violinist Isaac Stern made a performance tour across China with pianist David Golub, and the Center assisted in the production of the award-winning documentary "From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China." Arthur Miller directed the first Chinese-language production of "Death of a Salesman" with the Beijing Peoples' Arts Theater; and opera star Luciano Pavarotti performed in China [4] for vast audiences—bigger than those for opera performances in the United States. George White of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center directed the Chinese-language production of the Broadway show The Music Man;[5] the ballet works of George Balanchine, "Serenade" and "La Valse" were performed by the Central Ballet in Beijing for the first time. These performances and productions reached large audiences in China.

Early visitors included Lincoln Center Chairman Martin Segal, choreographers Anna Sokolow and Alwin Nikolais, literary artist and critic Susan Sontag, sculptor George Segal, writers Hortense Calisher and Herman Wouk, and set designer Ming Cho Lee. Visitors from China were of an equally high status, although well known in China their names were new to most Americans: playwright Cao Yu, actor Ying Ruocheng, writer Ding Ling, qin master Wu Wenguang, costume designer Li Keyu, composers Chen Gang and Mao Yuan, and conductor Chen Xieyang were among the first batch for whom the Center created programs.

The Center's goal and priority was to initiate long-term and ongoing programs of greater depth that would have lasting results in both China and the U.S. These projects were on the docket in the early days of operations. Several of the ongoing programs are outlined below:

Lin Mohan, Vice Minister of Culture and Chou Wen-chung, Director of the Center for US-China Arts Exchange. Beijing, China. 1980.

Weishan City, Yunnan province, China. 1991.

During its second decade of programming, the Center expanded its scope beyond the arts of urban centers to include folk genres in rural areas. The new program of cultural conservation focused on the indigenous people of China's southwestern Yunnan Province, which is home to twenty-five ethnic minority groups. (In China, this term is translated into English as "minority nationalities.")

The projects mobilized cultural workers in Yunnan—creating in crafts and traditional forms—as well as provincial scholars of anthropology and related fields. Specialists from Yunnan conducted research in the United States by observing a range of approaches and styles in conservation, education and presentation. They visited institutions dedicated to the culture and arts of diverse minority groups in the U.S., including Native Americans, Latinos and African Americans as well as museums of art, design and natural history in urban areas. American specialists in the fields of museum administration, arts education, archival management, anthropology, archaeology and ethnography visited Yunnan to learn about the cultural realities in China and to share information on existing best practices in the United States.

The efforts of the first five years of this programming (1990-1995) resulted in the establishment of a new ethnography museum in Kunming, called the Yunnan Nationalities Museum, representing the indigenous ethnic groups in the province; the creation of the first indigenous arts department, teaching music, dance and visual arts, at the Yunnan Nationalities University; mentorship programs in rural areas through which mentors in the arts passed on living traditions to young artists; and a research group of young scholars that resulted in the establishment of a "Center for the Studies of the Arts of Minority Nationalities" in the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.

The initial experience focused on the need to devote more attention to the component of nature as intrinsic in the artistic and cultural expression of indigenous people. Environmental preservation was then added to that of cultural conservation as a programmatic focus. Representatives from American environmental agencies and institutions such as the Field Museum in Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago worked in tandem with Chinese ecologists, ornithologists, and amphibian and fungi specialists of agencies including the Gaoligongshan Nature Reserve, Yunnan's Southwest Forestry College and the Kunming Institute of Zoology to spearhead ground-breaking projects where both the environment and cultural lifestyle were jeopardized by modern developments. The projects focused on the regions of Weishan City and Valley and Gaoligongshan. All projects were continued under the sole direction of the participants in Yunnan.

• The Center for US China Arts Exchange (Archive website)
• Center for US-China Arts Exchange records at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University Library.
• Chou Wen-Chung website