Treasures of the Art Museum: Seals, Cantonese Painting and Calligraphy, and the Bei Shan Tang Legacy

One-line verdict: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Art Museum's crown jewels are the 1,800-plus ancient seals bequeathed by the Bei Shan Tang's J.S. Lee and the 1,000-plus works of Cantonese painting and calligraphy acquired from Jen Yu-wen in 1973 — but its real weight lies in the half-century tradition of seal scholarship and cataloguing that Wong Yan-chung built up from 1980 onwards.

⚠ This article is a campus-collection investigation (Category 05: Campus). Deceased donors, researchers and historical artists are named according to publicly available sources; figures and claims are tied to official sources where possible. Credibility: corroborated by multiple sources. For the building's design, institutional history and the "Ten Treasures of the North" Song-dynasty rubbings, see art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md; this piece does not repeat the architecture or the museum's institutional story, but focuses instead on the collections themselves and the people behind them.

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A university museum's opening day usually means "beginning with empty display cases." The CUHK Art Museum was an exception: when it opened in autumn 1971, its cases already held the bronzes, seals and model calligraphies one businessman had spent half a lifetime accumulating. That treasure trove never stopped growing; instead it ran along two streams — one of "objects" entering the collection, from the Bei Shan Tang seals to Jen Yu-wen's Cantonese painting and calligraphy; the other of "scholarship" accumulating, from James Watt's handwritten collection catalogues to Wong Yan-chung's volume-by-volume seal catalogues. The question this article answers is not how many treasures the museum holds, but: why do these count as its "crown jewels," and who carried them from private studies into public academia?

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# Who was Bei Shan Tang? How a businessman turned a private collection into a public one

The foundation of the CUHK Art Museum's collection rests on one name — Bei Shan Tang (北山堂) — whose owner was the late philanthropist and collector J.S. Lee (利榮森, 1915–2007). According to Bei Shan Tang Foundation materials^※, Lee was the son of Hong Kong industrialist Lee Hysan, and enrolled in the law faculty of Yenching University in Beijing in 1935; it was at Yenching that he became a senior-junior classmate of a certain Mr. Hu, who would also become a fellow collector, and with whom he would build Hong Kong's art-collecting circle decades later.

Lee's approach to collecting differed from the typical wealthy connoisseur: he was closer to a "scholar-collector," devoting his energies beyond collecting to research, publication and education. According to Bei Shan Tang Foundation materials^※, in 1985 he established the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, whose stated purpose was "to sponsor Chinese culture and the arts and to promote educational development"; as early as the 1970s, he had advocated establishing both the Institute of Chinese Studies and the Art Museum at CUHK. This three-stage engagement — initiative, founding gift, long-term funding — set him apart from patrons who make one-off donations of a single treasure: from its institutional design to the scale of its holdings, the Art Museum bears the Bei Shan Tang fingerprint.

The measure of Bei Shan Tang's importance to the museum can be taken from a single official statement. According to the museum's official history (Chinese)^※, the museum states plainly that "nearly half of the collection was donated by Mr. Lee," spanning painting and calligraphy, model calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, seals and miscellaneous categories, from the Neolithic through to the modern era. For a single name to support nearly half of a museum's holdings is rare in the history of Chinese museums — it means the museum's taste and strengths are, in a sense, an amplification of J.S. Lee's personal discernment.

After Lee's death in 2007, the stream of donations did not dry up. According to the Bei Shan Tang Foundation's public statements, the family has continued its support of the museum in accordance with his wishes, directed toward "teaching, research, publication and display"; as late as the 2025 opening of the Art Museum's new wing, the Foundation was still sponsoring major exhibitions and continuing to donate new acquisitions (see section 9 of art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md). A name that has kept feeding the same museum for half a century, across the founder's lifetime and beyond, is itself the most stable thread in the museum's collecting narrative.

# The Min Chiu Society: the collecting circle behind Bei Shan Tang

To grasp the weight of Bei Shan Tang, one must also look at the collecting community Lee belonged to. According to public records, around 1960 Lee, together with his Yenching senior Mr. Hu and a banker, Mr. Chen, launched in Hong Kong the connoisseurs' society Min Chiu Society (敏求精舍), a gathering of art collectors who met regularly to appreciate and appraise; Lee served for many years as honorary secretary and then chairman. The name "Min Chiu" comes from the Analects' phrase "敏以求之" — "eagerly seeking it" — signalling precisely an approach of "collecting with a seeking mind." This background explains a hidden feature of the museum's holdings: it is not an isolated university collection but one embedded in a network of Hong Kong's post-war generation of Chinese connoisseur-collectors — the same people, the same eye, who both sustained the golden age of Hong Kong private collecting and laid the scholarly foundation of the CUHK Art Museum.

The Min Chiu circle's significance also lies in how it bridged "private appreciation" and "public display." These collectors were not content with solitary enjoyment in their studies; they regularly borrowed public and private venues in Hong Kong to stage exhibitions and publish catalogues, putting their connoisseurship and scholarship before the public. Lee's gift of the Bei Shan Tang collection to CUHK was the ultimate expression of this "collect, then make public" logic: one man's private passion, fixed at last as a university's standing collection. It is precisely why the museum's strengths so closely match the interests of the Min Chiu generation — bronzes, seals, model calligraphies, Yixing stoneware and literati painting and calligraphy were exactly the categories these connoisseurs pursued most seriously, rather than a well-rounded collection "rounded out" by a museum following disciplinary logic.

# Why did these national treasures converge on Hong Kong?

To understand how the museum's holdings arrived, one unavoidable backdrop must be told: in the mid-20th century, vast quantities of Chinese art treasures travelled south to Hong Kong amid the upheavals of the era, making the city for decades after the war a hub for Chinese art collecting and circulation. The collections of J.S. Lee, Jen Yu-wen and others were built against this backdrop — they were collectors, but also people who, in a diasporic age, "kept watch over the objects" of an entire civilisation. CUHK, founded in 1963 with the mission of "combining tradition with modernity, and bringing together China and the West," and with Chinese culture at the heart of its identity, was the natural home for these private treasures: collectors wanted a repository that would serve teaching and research in perpetuity, and a university devoted to Chinese culture needed primary objects to sustain its scholarship. The birth of the Art Museum was, in a sense, a historic meeting of supply and demand in 1971.

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# First Director James Watt: how "research-led" became the founding principle

For objects to become "scholarship," someone must set the rules. The Art Museum's first director was James C.Y. Watt (屈志仁, b. 1936). According to Watt's Baidu Baike entry^※, Watt was an Oxford graduate who had studied under Jao Tsung-I at the University of Hong Kong before becoming the museum's founding director; he later moved to the United States, serving from 2000 as Chairman of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A connoisseur who would go on to head the Met's Asian Art department, setting the framework for a young university museum at its founding — that is an unusually high-calibre opening move.

The most important principle Watt established was "academic research as the foundation of exhibitions." According to a recent museum exhibition reviewing the founding archive, the museum preserves Watt's handwritten object records and catalogues from the opening period, and these manuscripts reveal a founding vision in which the museum would serve not only CUHK teachers and students but society at large, with exhibitions built on academic research and the collection developed cumulatively into "a resource for all researchers and students of Chinese art." This sentence is the key to understanding the museum's character: from day one it declined to be a "pretty showroom" and set out to be an institution that produces knowledge. That the seal collection could in turn become a field of scholarship is precisely the long-term payoff of this founding rule.

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# Seals: why "scholarship" is worth more than "objects"

The museum's most celebrated specialisation is ancient seals. According to the official press release, "The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals"^※, since the museum's founding in 1971 the Bei Shan Tang has donated more than 1,800 Chinese seals in total, a collection whose quantity and range put it "foremost among university museums worldwide"; the museum calls it "one of the largest collections of Chinese seals in the world." The seals span more than two millennia, from the Warring States, Qin and Han through modern literati seal-carving. The most notable individual objects at the artifactual level are already listed in the existing article (the Warring States Qi seal "作横郑穆印", the Qin "相邦禅印", the Xin-dynasty clay sealing "湘阴臣印章", Huang Shiling's "定分学书", etc., in section 5 of art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md), so they are not repeated here.

What really makes these seals "crown jewels" is not just their number, but how thoroughly they have been studied. From September 2024 to June 2025, the museum mounted an exhibition of nearly 400 selected pieces under the title "Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals^※"; the key phrase in its English subtitle is "celebrating 50 years of Chinese seal scholarship." That subtitle reveals the museum's self-conception: it treats seals as a field of study that can be sustained for fifty years, not merely as a collection of old objects to be admired.

# Wong Yan-chung and half a century of seal cataloguing

The "fifty years of seal scholarship" is no empty phrase; it has a signature cataloguer — Wong Yan-chung (王人聪). According to the museum's publication record, Wong served successively as associate researcher, researcher and honorary researcher at the museum, devoting his career to cataloguing and annotating the seal collection. The seal catalogues and monographs he compiled for the museum from 1980 onwards were the crucial step in elevating these seals from "collection" to "scholarly resource." His representative publications are as follows (compiled from the museum's publications page^※ and public bibliographic records):

This bibliography is itself the skeleton of "fifty years of seal scholarship." It reveals a truth often overlooked: a collection of ancient seals lying in storage is merely a pile of old objects; only when each seal is rubbed, each inscription transcribed, each one dated and assembled into catalogues does it truly become a "resource" that scholars worldwide can cite. The museum's seals rank "foremost among university museums globally" precisely because of a double lead in both quantity and scholarship — the objects are the capital; the cataloguing is the interest.

This cataloguing tradition did not end with the passing of one generation of researchers; in recent years it has flowed back into international academic events. According to the official press release^※, alongside the Bei Shan Tang Legacy exhibition, the Art Museum, the Institute of Chinese Studies and CUHK's Department of Fine Arts jointly held the "Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals" international symposium, sponsored by the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, bringing together scholars from various places to discuss the seals' historical value, their script and artistic interpretation, and even the application of scientific techniques to seal studies. CUHK Vice-Chancellor and President Rocky Tuan also said at the exhibition's opening that he was "sincerely grateful for the Bei Shan Tang Foundation's generous support of CUHK over the years." A museum that can turn one collection into a scholarly field spanning half a century and continually summoning international peers — that is the most concrete gloss on "crown jewel." What it secures is not a display case but an entire academic discipline.

# Two millennia of institutions hidden in the seals

For historical studies, the value of seals lies not only in the beauty of their carving but in their being physical slices of ancient officialdom and systems of authentication. According to the exhibition's sectional framework, the museum arranged the seals under eight major themes: form and material, function, official seals, private seals, general-purpose seals, religious seals, pictorial seals, and literati-carved seals. This division is not arbitrary display logic but a condensed functional history of the seal: a Warring States official seal attests to the bureaucratic posts of a feudal state; a Xin-dynasty clay sealing reconstructs the administrative procedure of sealing documents; a Qing literati carving bears witness to the seal's transformation from "authentication tool" to "artistic creation." By placing the eight threads side by side, the museum condenses two millennia of authentication systems into a single gallery.

Of the eight threads, official seals best embody the "institutional" value. The forms, knobs, number of characters and recipients of Qin-Han official seals were all governed by a strict hierarchy, so a single official seal can often be dated to a specific dynasty and even a specific level of office — Wong Yan-chung's A Study of Official Seals of the Qin, Han, Wei, Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties (1990) could be written precisely because official seals are themselves a system of institutional codes that can be read systematically. Private and general-purpose seals reveal the other side: how people used seals in contracts, correspondence and everyday authentication, and how the evolution of name seals, idiom seals and auspicious-phrase seals traces the texture of social life. Religious and pictorial seals extend the seal's function beyond "administration and authentication" into "belief and ornament," adding a folkloric and religious dimension of interpretation to the collection alongside institutional history.

Literati-carved seals are the most purely "artistic" of the eight themes. From the Ming-Qing period onward, seals gradually shed their purely authenticating function to become a medium for literati to "write with the knife"; the collection's stone seal "定分学书" (1891) by Huang Shiling (1849–1908) is a case in point — a late-Qing carver fusing calligraphy, epigraphy and knife technique within a square inch, making a single seal simultaneously an authentication device, a work of calligraphy and a sculpture. The museum has gathered the two-thousand-year evolution from Warring States official seals to late-Qing literati carving into a single collection, each piece catalogued in turn — that is the substance of its "foremost among university museums worldwide" status: not possessing the most seals, but possessing the most thoroughly studied continuous history of the seal.

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# Cantonese Painting and Calligraphy: Jen Yu-wen and a thousand works of native art

If the seals are the "great vessel" Bei Shan Tang gave the museum, then the Cantonese painting and calligraphy is what another collector gave it by way of "native soil." According to the museum's official history (Chinese)^※, the core of the museum's Cantonese painting and calligraphy collection comes from the historian Jen Yu-wen (簡又文) — who systematically collected more than a thousand Ming-Qing Cantonese works, and whose collection the museum eventually "purchased in its entirety." The works entered the museum in 1973, only two years after it opened, fixing the collection's regional depth in Lingnan in a single stroke.

Jen Yu-wen himself is a history of Lingnan culture in one man. According to Jen Yu-wen's Wikipedia entry^※, he was a leading scholar of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history, as well as an art lover who sponsored "the father of the Lingnan school of painting," Gao Jianfu, and researched Lingnan epigraphy while devoting himself to preserving the documents of his native region. According to public records, his Cantonese painting and calligraphy collection spanned Lingnan artists from the Ming and Qing onwards, some 250 artists and around 1,300 works in all; under studio names such as "Baijian Lou" he kept more than a hundred works by Gao Jianfu and over a thousand paintings and calligraphies by Cantonese masters. Why would a historian of the Taiping Rebellion obsessively collect Cantonese art? The answer lies in the two characters xiangbang — "native region." For Jen, collecting was not elegant play but a way of keeping alive the artistic and documentary flame of an entire region. His collection's entry into the museum handed that archival mission over to the university.

Jen's collection has system precisely because it was built by a historian's hand. He did not simply acquire whatever famous work came along; he wove the Lingnan painting and calligraphy, epigraphic stones and native documents from the Ming dynasty downward into a mutually corroborating web around the single axis of "Guangdong" — collecting was itself an extension of his research on Cantonese history and the Taiping era. A body of some 250 artists and 1,300 works is large enough to sustain "collective-portrait" rather than "single-example" research into the history of Lingnan art: from Ming-Qing Cantonese painters, through the mogu (boneless) flower-and-bird painting of the modern "Two Ju" (Ju Chao and Ju Lian), to the eclectic reforms of the Lingnan school, the lineage links link by link. When the museum purchased the entire collection in 1973, it acquired not just paintings but a historian's half-built "Lingnan art specimen bank."

# Gao Jianfu and the Lingnan school: the core weight of the Jen collection

The scholarly heft of the Jen collection rests largely on the Lingnan school of painting. According to Gao Jianfu's Wikipedia entry^※, Gao Jianfu (1879–1951) was a founding figure of the Lingnan school, known with his younger brother Gao Qifeng and their friend Chen Shuren as the "Three Masters of Lingnan"; he advocated "eclectically reconciling China and the West, fusing the ancient and the modern," introducing Japanese and Western realist techniques into traditional Chinese painting, and in 1924 founded the Chun Shui Painting Academy (春睡畫院), nurturing a generation of masters including Li Xiongcai and Guan Shanyue. Jen's personal friendship with Gao meant he could systematically collect Lingnan-school works at the source — which is precisely what gives the museum's Cantonese collection its standing as "the core public repository for Lingnan-school research." According to the museum's official history (Chinese)^※, the museum holds over a hundred works by Gao Jianfu, which, together with Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren and others, form a complete specimen collection for studying the Lingnan school.

It should be noted that the Three Masters of Lingnan were in their early years involved to varying degrees in the revolutionary activities of the late Qing and early Republic (Gao Jianfu, for instance, went to Japan and joined the Tongmenghui); this is an objective fact of their biographies, mentioned here only for historical accuracy and not elaborated; the museum's collecting focus has always been on their artistic achievement and the genealogical value of the Lingnan school.

Around this collection the museum has over the years mounted a series of Cantonese art exhibitions: from "The Elegant Assemblage of Yue," focused on the mid-Ming to mid-Qing, to "The Confluence of Yue," extending into the late Qing and Republic, tracing in turn the great Qing-era Cantonese collecting studios — Fengman Lou, Yunjing Guan, Haishan Xianguan — and the standoff between the Lingnan school and the Chinese Painting Research Society (exhibition details in section 7 of art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md). The common underlying stock of all these exhibitions was precisely Jen's systematic collection; and the 2025 acquisition of the Huang family's former "Xiaofanfang Studio" (小畫舫齋) holdings extends this Cantonese thread into the Republican era. A history of Lingnan art, relayed from one private study to the next, has thus been unfolded layer by layer in the Art Museum.

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# Furniture and Yixing stoneware: the underrated third and fourth collecting threads

The seals and Cantonese painting and calligraphy may be the museum's two most dazzling calling cards, but to fixate on just those two is to miss two further threads in its collecting system that are just as substantial. Beyond the seals and Cantonese art, the museum holds two more lines often passed over by visitors yet weighty in the connoisseurship world: Ming-Qing furniture and Yixing stoneware. The furniture is notable for juxtaposing the Guangzhou, Beijing and Suzhou regional styles, whose regional differences and representative forms are already set out in a table in the existing article (section 8 of art-museum-and-institute-of-chinese-studies.md), so they are not repeated here.

The thread worth singling out is Yixing stoneware. According to the museum's official history (Chinese)^※, the museum rates itself thus: "Our collection of ancient seals and Yixing stoneware is especially rich, comparable even to national- and world-class museum collections." To rank Yixing stoneware alongside the seals as two strengths "comparable to national-level collections" is a rare piece of high self-assessment in the museum's official voice. Yixing stoneware holds a special place in the connoisseurship system because it fuses in a single object the "utilitarian vessel," "literati taste" and the "signature of a famous potter" — a Yixing teapot bearing a master's carved inscription is at once a tea vessel and a miniature carrier of painting, calligraphy and epigraphy, echoing the seal's dual nature as both authentication and art. That the museum should reach the summit in both seals and Yixing stoneware is no coincidence: both demand a connoisseur's eye that understands "both craft and inscription," which was precisely the specialty of the Bei Shan Tang and Min Chiu generation of collectors.

# How do objects become "teaching materials"?

What sets the museum apart from a general public gallery is its position within CUHK's Institute of Chinese Studies (中國文化研究所) system, which gives its holdings a dual identity as both "exhibits" and "teaching and research materials." This institutional embeddedness is no formality: a collection of seals each individually catalogued can be placed directly in the hands of teachers and students of paleography, seal-carving history and Qin-Han institutional history; a systematically assembled body of Cantonese painting and calligraphy can sustain specialised courses and postgraduate theses in Lingnan art history; and the study booklets and lecture series the museum produces for each exhibition convert objects in storage into resources usable by both the general visitor and the specialised researcher. In other words, the museum's collection is not "hidden treasure" but "primary sources spread out on the table" — the seal's systems of authentication, the Cantonese works' regional genealogy, the Yixing stoneware's craft and authorship marks can all be cited as evidence in teaching and research. This is precisely how James Watt's founding principle of "research-led" was implemented, and it is what the four characters "university museum" mean in the most literal sense.

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# The three great donor threads: who gave the museum what?

Breaking down the museum's holdings, one finds it is not a museum "accumulated evenly" but one built up from several clearly distinguishable private collections stacked together. The table below sets the three main donor threads side by side, showing at a glance each one's contribution and character:

Seen together, the museum's collecting history is a relay race of "private collections becoming public ones": Bei Shan Tang laid the foundation, Jen Yu-wen supplied the native-region depth, the Huang family added the cream of the Republican era — each generation of collectors handed the treasures of their studies to the university in exchange for "service to teaching and research, and preservation in perpetuity." The significance of this model goes beyond the objects themselves: it let a university museum open its doors with substantial holdings rather than starting from nothing, and it froze the eye of Hong Kong's post-war generation of collectors into a public institution that later generations can study again and again.

This path of "private to public" differs markedly from the mainland Chinese museum model, where collections are typically assembled through state requisition and institutional transfer. The museum's holdings are the result of a few collectors accumulating objects by hand in a diasporic age, then handing them over by hand; the collection therefore carries distinct personal marks and taste rather than being evenly filled according to a disciplinary scheme. That is both its limitation — certain categories run exceptionally deep because of a collector's interests, others relatively thin — and its distinction: the "peaks" of seals, Cantonese painting and calligraphy, and Yixing stoneware are precisely the fields several collectors devoted their lives to. Understand the collectors, and you understand why this museum grew into what it is today.

Returning to the question at the start: what, exactly, is the Art Museum's crown jewel? To answer "over 1,800 seals" or "over a thousand Cantonese works" is only to have counted the objects. The more accurate answer is: the seals plus Wong Yan-chung's half-century of cataloguing, the Cantonese painting and calligraphy plus Jen Yu-wen's devotion to his native region, the private treasures plus the "research-led" principle James Watt established — objects and scholarship, collectors and researchers fused into one, that is the true heirloom of this "one of the finest university museums in Greater China."

Related reading: Art Museum and Institute of Chinese Studies: a Chinese art hub with I.M. Pei's involvement and Bei Shan Tang's founding gift, Museums and the Campus Ecology, Campus Buildings and Places Directory.

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