The Art Museum’s Masterpieces: Seals, Guangdong Painting and Calligraphy, and Bei Shan Tang’s Crown Jewels

Bottom line: The crown jewels of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Art Museum are the over 1,800 ancient seals donated by J.S. Lee’s Bei Shan Tang and the more than one thousand Guangdong paintings and calligraphy works acquired from Jen Yu‑wen in 1973. Their real weight, however, lies in the half‑century tradition of seal scholarship carried forward by Wang Rencong from 1980 onwards.

⚠ This article belongs to the campus collection research series (05 Campus). Deceased donors, researchers, and historical artists are identified by name based on publicly available records; all figures and assertions are sourced from nearby official references, and credibility is cross‑confirmed. For background on the building’s design, institutional history, and the ‘Ten Bei Shan Rubbings’ of the Song dynasty, see this article. Here, instead of repeating architectural or institutional history, we focus on the collections themselves and the people behind them.

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When a university museum opens its doors, the usual starting point is empty display cases. The CUHK Art Museum was an exception: when it opened in the autumn of 1971, its cases already held bronzes, seals, and calligraphic model‑rubbings accumulated by a merchant over half a lifetime. That collection did not stand still; it branched into two rivers—one of objects, from the Bei Shan Tang seals to Jen Yu‑wen’s Guangdong paintings and calligraphy; the other of scholarship, from James C.Y. Watt’s handwritten collection catalogue to Wang Rencong’s volume after volume of seal catalogues. This piece does not ask how many treasures the museum holds, but rather why these items count as “crown jewels”, and who moved them from private studies into public academia.

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# Who Was Bei Shan Tang? How a Merchant Turned a Private Collection into a Public Holding

The collection foundation of the CUHK Art Museum rests on a studio name—Bei Shan Tang (Bei Shan Tang). Its owner was the late philanthropist and collector J.S. Lee (1915–2007). According to Bei Shan Tang Foundation materials^※, J.S. Lee was the son of Hong Kong industrialist Lee Hysan. He enrolled in the Law School of Yenching University in Beiping in 1935; it was at Yenching that he and a fellow student, surnamed Hu, who would later also become a collector, became senior and junior schoolmates, and decades later together shaped the art‑collecting circles in Hong Kong.

J.S. Lee’s approach to collecting differed from that of typical wealthy connoisseurs: he was more of a “scholar‑collector”, devoting himself not only to collecting but also to research, publication, and education. According to Bei Shan Tang Foundation materials^※, he established the Bei Shan Tang Foundation in 1985 with the express aim of “sponsoring Chinese culture and art and promoting educational development”. And as early as the 1970s, he had already proposed the establishment of the Institute of Chinese Studies and the Art Museum at CUHK. This three‑stage intervention—proposal, foundational donation, and long‑term funding—sets him apart from one‑off donors of a single treasure: from the museum’s institutional design to the scale of its holdings, the Bei Shan Tang fingerprint is everywhere.

The weight of the Bei Shan Tang in the Art Museum can be measured by an official statement. Citing the Museum’s official history (Chinese)^※, the museum states that “nearly half of the collection was donated by Mr. Lee”, spanning painting and calligraphy, rubbings, bronzes, ceramics, seals, and miscellaneous items, and covering periods from the Neolithic to the modern era. For a single studio to underpin nearly half of a museum’s holdings is rare in the history of Chinese museums—it means that the museum’s tastes and strengths are, in a sense, an amplification of J.S. Lee’s personal tastes.

After J.S. Lee passed away in 2007, this river of donations did not dry up. According to public statements from the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, his family has continued to support the Art Museum in accordance with his wishes, directing funds towards “teaching, research, publication, and display”. Even with the opening of the museum’s new wing in 2025, the Bei Shan Tang Foundation is still sponsoring major exhibitions and continuing to donate new works (see this article, section nine). A single studio spanning half a century and outliving its founder to keep nourishing the same museum—this is the most reliable thread running through the narrative of the Art Museum’s collections.

# Min Chiu Society: The Collecting Circle Behind Bei Shan Tang

To appreciate the weight of the Bei Shan Tang, one must look at the collecting circle J.S. Lee belonged to. According to public records, around 1960, J.S. Lee, along with his Yenching senior surnamed Hu and a banker surnamed Chen, among others, founded a collectors’ society in Hong Kong called the Min Chiu Society (Min Chiu Society). They met regularly to appreciate and appraise objects, and J.S. Lee served for many years as its honorary secretary and chairman. The Chinese name “Min Chiu” (敏求) is taken from the Analects phrase “敏以求之” (“seeking it with diligence”), precisely championing the approach of “collecting with a thirst for knowledge”. This background reveals an implicit feature of the Art Museum’s collection: it is not an isolated university collection but is embedded within the network of postwar‑generation Chinese connoisseurs in Hong Kong—the same people, the same discerning eye, both underpinning the golden age of private collecting in Hong Kong and laying the academic foundations of the CUHK Art Museum.

The significance of the Min Chiu Society circle also lies in how it bridged “private connoisseurship” and “public display”. These collectors were not content with solitary enjoyment in their studies; they regularly organised exhibitions and published catalogues at both public and private venues in Hong Kong, sharing their vision and research with the public. J.S. Lee’s handing over of the Bei Shan Tang collection to CUHK represents the ultimate realisation of this “collect then make public” logic: one person’s elegant pastime, solidified into a university’s permanent collection. It is precisely for this reason that the Art Museum’s strengths overlap so heavily with the interests of the Min Chiu Society generation of collectors—bronzes, seals, model‑rubbings, zisha, and literati painting and calligraphy were exactly the fields in which these connoisseurs most exerted themselves, rather than being a uniform collection “rounded out” according to some academic discipline matrix.

# Why Did These National Treasures Converge on Hong Kong?

To understand the provenance of the Art Museum’s collections, one cannot ignore a broader context: in the mid‑20th century, a great many Chinese art treasures were brought south to Hong Kong amidst political turmoil, making the city a hub for Chinese art collecting and circulation in the postwar decades. The collections of J.S. Lee, Jen Yu‑wen, and others were built against this backdrop—they were not just collectors but also guardians of a whole civilisation’s objects during years of displacement. CUHK was founded in 1963 with the mission “to combine tradition with modernity and to bring together China and the West”, and taking Chinese culture as its institutional bedrock, it became a natural destination for these private collections: the collectors needed a “teaching and research, long‑term custodian” home for their treasures, and a university that championed Chinese culture needed primary objects to underpin 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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# The First Director, James C.Y. Watt: How Was the “Research‑First” Ethos Established?

For a collection to become “scholarship”, someone must set the rules. The first director of the CUHK Art Museum was James C.Y. Watt (1936– ). According to his Baidu Baike entry^※, Watt was educated at Oxford University, later studied under Jao Tsung‑i at the University of Hong Kong, and became the founding curator of the Art Museum. He later moved to the United States and from 2000 onwards served for a long period as the Chair of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A connoisseur who would later head the Met’s Asian Art department setting the framework for a young university museum at its inception—this was a founding gesture of no ordinary calibre.

The single most important principle Watt laid down for the museum was “academic research as the foundation of exhibition”. According to a recent museum exhibition reviewing its founding archives, the museum has preserved Watt’s handwritten collection records and catalogues from the opening period, and these manuscripts reveal a founding vision: the Art Museum was to serve not only CUHK faculty and students but society at large; exhibitions must be grounded in academic research, and the collection should be gradually built up to become “a resource for all students and researchers of Chinese art”. This sentence is the key to understanding the museum’s character: from day one, it never intended to be a “nice‑looking showroom” but an institution that produces knowledge. That the seal collection could in turn become a field of scholarship is the long‑term realisation of this founding rule.

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# Seals: Why “Scholarship” Is Worth More Than “Objects”

The Art Museum’s most famous specialism is ancient seals. According to the official press release “The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals”^※, since the museum’s opening in 1971, Bei Shan Tang has donated a cumulative over 1,800 Chinese seals, a quantity and diversity that puts this collection “in a league of its own” among university museums globally; the museum also describes it as one of “the largest collections of seals in the world”. These seals span from the Warring States and Qin–Han periods through to modern literati seal carving, covering over two millennia. Notable individual objects—such as the Warring States Qi “Zuoheng Zhengmu Seal”, the Qin “Chancellor’s Seal”, the Xin dynasty clay sealing “Xiangyin Official Seal”, or Huang Shiling’s “Dingfen Xueshu”—have already been listed in an existing entry (see this article, section five) and will not be repeated here.

What truly makes these seals a “crown jewel” of the museum is not just the number of items but the depth to which they have been studied. From September 2024 to June 2025, the Art Museum held an exhibition titled “The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals^※”, presenting a selection of nearly 400 pieces from the collection. The key phrase in its English subtitle is “celebrating 50 years of Chinese seal scholarship”. This subtitle reveals the museum’s self‑positioning: it treats seals as a field of study that can be sustained for fifty years, not merely a batch of antiquities to be admired.

# Wang Rencong and Half a Century of Seal Collection Cataloguing

“Fifty years of seal scholarship” is no empty phrase; it has one emblematic cataloguer—Wang Rencong. According to the museum’s publication record, Wang served successively as associate researcher, researcher, and honorary researcher at the Art Museum, devoting his life to cataloguing and annotating this seal collection. The seal catalogues and monographs he compiled for the museum from 1980 onwards constitute the crucial link in elevating these seals from a “collection” to a “scholarly resource”. Below are his representative works (compiled from the museum’s publications page^※ and public bibliographies):

This bibliography is itself the skeleton of that “fifty years of seal scholarship”. It reveals a frequently overlooked truth: a batch of ancient seals lying in a storeroom is merely a heap of antiquities; only when each one is individually rubbed, transcribed, annotated, dated, and compiled into a catalogue does it truly become a “resource” that scholars worldwide can cite. The reason the museum’s seal collection can claim a “league‑of‑its‑own” status among global university museums is precisely this dual lead in both quantity and cataloguing—the objects are the capital, but the catalogues are the interest yielded.

This cataloguing tradition did not stop with the retirement of one generation of researchers but has, in recent years, fed back into international scholarly activities. According to the official press release^※, alongside the “Bei Shan Tang Legacy” exhibition, the Art Museum, the Institute of Chinese Studies, and the Department of Fine Arts jointly organised an international symposium titled “The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals”, sponsored by the Bei Shan Tang Foundation. It brought together scholars from various places to discuss the historical value of seals, the interpretation of their script and artistry, and even the application of scientific technology in seal studies. The then Vice‑Chancellor and President, Rocky S. Tuan, also remarked at the exhibition opening that he “expressed heartfelt thanks to the Bei Shan Tang Foundation for its generous support to CUHK over the years”. That a museum could turn a collection into a field of scholarship spanning over half a century, one that continues to summon international colleagues—this is the most concrete annotation to the phrase “crown jewel”: what it anchors is not a display case but an entire academic domain.

# Two Thousand Years of Institutional History Concealed in the Seals

For historians, seals are valuable not only for the beauty of their carving but also because they are physical slices of ancient bureaucratic and authentication systems. According to the thematic framework of the “Bei Shan Tang Legacy” exhibition, the museum presents this collection under eight major themes: form and material, function and usage, official seals, private seals, general‑use seals, religious seals, pictorial seals, and literati seal carving. This arrangement is not a random display logic but a microcosmic functional history of seals: a Warring States official seal can corroborate the official posts of a feudal state, a Xin dynasty clay sealing can reconstruct the administrative procedure of document sealing, and a Qing dynasty literati seal carving testifies to how seals transformed from “tools of authentication” into “artistic creations”. By placing these eight threads side by side, the museum condenses two thousand years of authentication systems into a single gallery.

Among these eight threads, the one that best embodies “institutional” value is official seals. The shape, knob style, number of characters, and the recipient of Qin and Han official seals were all strictly governed by hierarchical regulations, so an official seal can often be dated to a specific dynasty and even a specific rank of office—Wang Rencong’s A Study of Official Seals of the Qin, Han, Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties (1990) was possible precisely because official seals themselves constitute a systematic code that can be deciphered. Private seals and general‑use seals reveal another side: how ancient people used seals on contracts, letters, and daily authentication, and the evolution of personal name seals, proverb seals, and auspicious phrase seals sketches the texture of social life. Religious seals and pictorial seals, meanwhile, extend the use of seals from “administration and authentication” to “faith and decoration”, adding a folkloric and religious interpretive dimension to the collection beyond institutional history.

Literati seal carving is the strand among the eight themes closest to “pure art”. From the Ming and Qing onwards, seals gradually shed their purely authentication function and became a medium of artistic creation for the literati, using the knife as a brush. The museum’s stone seal “Dingfen Xueshu” (1891) by Huang Shiling (1849–1908) is one example—a late Qing seal carver fused calligraphy, epigraphy, and knife‑work within a square inch, making a single seal simultaneously an authentication token, a piece of calligraphy, and a sculpture. The museum’s inclusion of this two‑thousand‑year evolution from Warring States official seals to late Qing literati carving within the same collection, and its individual cataloguing of each piece, is the real substance of its “league‑of‑its‑own” status among global university museums: not owning the most seals, but owning the most thoroughly studied general history of seals.

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# Guangdong Painting and Calligraphy: Jen Yu‑wen and the “Bangyuan Lou” Thousand Works of Regional Pride

If seals were the “heavyweight pieces” Bei Shan Tang gave the Art Museum, then Guangdong painting and calligraphy are the “native soil” given by another collector. According to the Museum’s official history (Chinese)^※, the core of the museum’s Guangdong painting and calligraphy holding comes from the historian Jen Yu‑wen—he systematically amassed over a thousand Ming and Qing Guangdong paintings and calligraphy works, and the Art Museum eventually “purchased and accessioned his entire collection”. The year of acquisition was 1973, only two years after the museum opened, and in one stroke anchored the museum’s regional depth firmly in Lingnan.

Jen Yu‑wen himself was a walking history of Lingnan culture. According to his Wikipedia entry^※, he was a leading scholar of Taiping Rebellion history and an art lover who sponsored Gao Jianfu, “the father of the Lingnan school of painting”, and devoted himself to researching Lingnan epigraphy and preserving regional documents. Public records state that his Guangdong painting and calligraphy collection spanned Lingnan artists from the Ming and Qing onwards, totalling around 250 figures and about 1,300 works, stored under studio names like “Baijian Lou” (Hundred Swords Pavilion), including over one hundred works by Gao Jianfu and over a thousand works by Guangdong masters. Why was a Taiping historian so fixated on collecting Guangdong painting and calligraphy? The answer lies in the phrase “regional pride” (鄉邦): for Jen Yu‑wen, collecting was not an elegant pastime but an effort to keep the artistic and documentary heritage of an entire region alive. The transfer of his collection to the university was thus the passing on of this mission to “preserve history”.

Jen Yu‑wen’s collection was systematic precisely because it came from the hands of a historian. He did not simply acquire any famous piece; instead, he wove Lingnan painting, epigraphy, and regional documents from the Ming dynasty onwards into a mutually corroborative web centred on the “Guangdong” regional axis—the collection itself was an extension of his research into Guangdong history and the Taiping Rebellion. The scale of about 250 painters and 1,300 works means this collection is sufficient to support a “group‑portrait” rather than an “isolated‑case” study of Lingnan art history: from Ming and Qing Guangdong painters, to the boneless flower‑and‑bird style of the modern “Two Jus” (Ju Chao and Ju Lian) lineage, to the eclectic revolution of the Lingnan school, the pedigree interlocks seamlessly. When the Art Museum purchased and accessioned the whole lot in 1973, it gained not just a batch of paintings but a “Lingnan art specimen bank” constructed by a historian over half a lifetime.

# Gao Jianfu and the Lingnan School: The Core Weight of Jen Yu‑wen’s Collection

The academic weight of Jen Yu‑wen’s collection lies largely in the Lingnan school. According to Gao Jianfu’s Wikipedia entry^※, Gao Jianfu (Gao Jianfu, 1879–1951) was one of the founders of the Lingnan school of painting, known alongside his younger brother Gao Qifeng and friend Chen Shuren as the “Three Masters of Lingnan”. He advocated “eclectically blending East and West, and fusing past and present”, introducing techniques from Japanese painting and Western realism into traditional Chinese painting, and in 1924 founded the Chunshui Painting Academy, which nurtured a generation of masters including Li Xiongcai and Guan Shanyue. Jen Yu‑wen’s personal friendship with Gao Jianfu allowed him to systematically collect Lingnan school works at the source—this is precisely the foundation for the Art Museum’s Guangdong painting and calligraphy collection being able to position itself as “a core public collection for Lingnan school research”. According to the Museum’s official history (Chinese)^※, the museum holds over one hundred works by Gao Jianfu, which, together with those by Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren, and others, form a complete specimen bank for studying the Lingnan school.

It should be noted that the Three Masters of Lingnan were involved in revolutionary activities during the late Qing and early Republican period (for example, Gao Jianfu spent time in Japan and joined the Tongmenghui). This is a matter of their personal historical record and is mentioned here only as factual context without elaboration; the Art Museum’s focus has always been on their artistic achievements and the pedigree value for the Lingnan school.

Around this collection, the museum has over the years curated a series of special exhibitions on Guangdong painting and calligraphy: from “Elegant Gathering in Guangdong” focussing on the mid‑Ming to mid‑Qing, to “Converging Currents in Guangdong” extending into the late Qing and Republican era, they have systematically teased out Qing dynasty Guangdong collecting studios such as Fengman Lou, Yunqing Guan, and Haishan Xianguan, as well as the parallel structures of the Lingnan school and the National Painting Research Society (a full list of exhibitions can be found in this article, section seven). The common foundation for all these exhibitions was Jen Yu‑wen’s systematic collection; and the 2025 acquisition of the “Small Painted Boat Studio” former collection of the Wong family has further extended this Guangdong thread into the Republican period. A history of Lingnan art, relayed from one private study to another, is thus being unrolled layer by layer within the Art Museum.

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# Furniture and Zisha: The Underrated Third and Fourth Collecting Threads

Seals and Guangdong painting and calligraphy may be the museum’s two most brilliant calling cards, but to stare at only those two is to miss another two equally substantial threads in its collecting system. Beyond seals and Guangdong painting and calligraphy, the Art Museum has two other lines that are often overlooked by visitors but carry great weight in connoisseur circles: Ming and Qing furniture and Yixing zisha. The Ming and Qing furniture collection is notable for its side‑by‑side display of the Cantonese, Beijing, and Suzhou regional styles, and the regional differences and representative forms have already been presented in a table in an existing entry (see this article, section eight), so they are not repeated here.

More worthy of separate mention is Yixing zisha. According to the Museum’s official history (Chinese)^※, the museum itself states that “our collection of ancient seals and Yixing zisha is particularly rich, even comparable to the holdings of national and world‑class museums”. Placing zisha alongside seals as two strengths “comparable to national‑level”—this is an unusually high self‑assessment in the museum’s official discourse. Zisha holds a special place in the connoisseurship system because it layers three qualities onto a single object: a utensil for practical use, literati taste, and the inscribed signature of a master potter. A zisha teapot bearing a master’s inscription is at once a tea vessel and a miniature carrier of painting, calligraphy, and epigraphy, echoing the dual nature of seals as objects of both authentication and art. That the museum should hold pole positions in both seals and zisha is no coincidence: both require a connoisseurial eye that “understands both craft and inscription”, and that was precisely the speciality of the Bei Shan Tang and Min Chiu Society generation of collectors.

# How Do Collections Become “Teaching Materials”?

What distinguishes the Art Museum from a conventional public museum is its embeddedness within CUHK’s Institute of Chinese Studies (Institute of Chinese Studies), which gives its collection a dual identity as both “exhibits” and “teaching and research materials”. This affiliation is no hollow gesture: a set of seals individually catalogued can be directly handled and studied by teachers and students of palaeography, seal‑carving history, and Qin–Han institutional history; a systematically assembled collection of Guangdong painting and calligraphy can support specialised courses on Lingnan art history and postgraduate dissertations; and the study guides and accompanying lectures the museum produces for each exhibition translate objects from the storeroom into resources usable by both general visitors and specialist researchers. In other words, the Art Museum’s collection is not “treasures locked away” but “primary sources laid open”—the authentication system behind the seals, the regional genealogy of Guangdong painting and calligraphy, and the craft signatures of zisha can all be cited as empirical evidence in teaching and research. This is precisely how James C.Y. Watt’s founding “research‑first” principle was realised, and it is the true meaning of the phrase “university museum”.

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# The Three Great Donation Sources: Who Gave What to the Museum?

If you break down the museum’s foundation, you will find that it is not a museum built up through steady, even accumulation, but one formed by the layering of several clearly identifiable private collections. The table below juxtaposes the three major donation threads, revealing at a glance their respective contributions and character:

Taken together, the history of the Art Museum’s collection is actually a relay story of “private‑to‑public” transfer: Bei Shan Tang laid the foundation, Jen Yu‑wen supplemented it with regional holdings, and the Wong family carried on with Republican‑era gems. Each generation of collectors handed over the treasures of their studies to the university in exchange for “teaching, research, and long‑term preservation”. The significance of this model goes beyond the objects themselves—it allowed a university museum to possess a respectable quality from the very beginning, rather than starting from scratch, and it solidified the discerning eye of Hong Kong’s postwar generation of collectors into a public institution that future generations can repeatedly study.

This “private‑to‑public” route is quite different from the founding model of mainland Chinese museums, most of which were built through state solicitation and institutional allocation. The foundation of the Art Museum is the result of several collectors personally accumulating and then personally entrusting their collections during years of displacement; the collection therefore bears a distinctive personal imprint and vision, rather than being uniformly filled out according to an academic discipline matrix. This is both its limitation—some fields are particularly deep because of a collector’s interest, while others are relatively thin—and its special character: the “peak” fields of seals, Guangdong painting and calligraphy, and zisha are exactly the areas where these collectors expended their lifelong efforts. Only by understanding the collectors can one truly understand why this museum has taken the shape it has today.

Let us return to the opening question: what exactly are the Art Museum’s crown jewels? If one answers only “over 1,800 seals” or “over a thousand Guangdong paintings and calligraphy works”, that merely counts the objects. The more accurate answer is: it is the seals plus Wang Rencong’s half‑century of cataloguing; it is the Guangdong paintings and calligraphy plus Jen Yu‑wen’s regional purpose; it is the private collections plus James C. Y. Watt’s “research‑first” ethos—the layering of objects and scholarship, collectors and researchers, is what forms the true heirloom treasure of this museum, “one of the best university museums in Greater China”.

Related reading: The Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies: An I. M. Pei‑Designed Chinese Art Stronghold Founded on the Bei Shan Tang Collection, Overview of Museums and Campus Ecology, Campus Building and Venue Directory.

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