The Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies: a Chinese-art powerhouse with a Pei-designed home and a Bei Shan Tang foundation

A museum at the heart of campus, co-designed by the architectural master I. M. Pei — and yet from its very first day it was never starting "from scratch". Built on the private collection of a philanthropist, it has grown over five decades into a public holding of more than 16,000 objects. This piece braids together the two threads that define the Art Museum: how it came to be (institutional history, the design of its home, the foundation and provenance of its collection), and what it holds (the four great specialisations — seals, Song-dynasty rubbings, Guangdong painting and calligraphy, and Ming–Qing furniture). The building's story and the treasures within are two faces of the same museum, so they are treated side by side here. For an overview of campus museums and the broader ecology, see museums-and-ecology.md; for the Institute of Chinese Studies and related academic bodies, see chinese-studies-and-archives.md, part of the research section. Deceased donors and directors are named as recorded in public sources.

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# 1. Founding (1971): the birth of a university museum

According to the Art Museum's official history^※ and the English Wikipedia entry^※, the CUHK Art Museum was founded in 1971, sited at the centre of campus. Its stated purpose is to collect, preserve, research and exhibit artefacts that illuminate Chinese ancient and modern art, the humanities and cultural heritage — for the university community and for Hong Kong society at large. The museum's creation was the combined work of several key figures:

• The visionary: according to the museum's official history^※, the University's founding Vice-Chancellor, Li Choh-ming (Choh-Ming Li), wanted to establish a museum for CUHK;
• The founder of the collection and guiding hand: the late philanthropist Dr. J. S. Lee (Lee Jung-sen, 利榮森), master of the Bei Shan Tang collection, provided essential guidance and support;
• The first director: per the same source, Dr. Lee recruited James Watt, an Oxford-educated curator then serving at the Hong Kong City Hall Museum of Art, to become the museum's founding director.

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# 2. The building: with I. M. Pei involved in the design

The Art Museum's home is itself an architectural work worth recording. According to the museum's official history^※, at Dr. Lee's request the building was designed by Dr. Szeto Wai and I. M. Pei, and this museum at the heart of campus opened in autumn 1971.

I. M. Pei was among the most celebrated Chinese architects of the twentieth century (his signature works include the Louvre Pyramid in Paris). That CUHK's Art Museum secured his involvement reflects both the connections and the taste of Dr. Lee of the Bei Shan Tang — and it meant that, from the day it opened, the museum carried a double value, as both a collection and a building. In the 2020s the museum underwent an expansion (per a CUHK in Focus report^※), folding contemporary architectural language into the preserved historic structure and sustaining the spatial character of "past and present in dialogue". The fruit of that expansion — the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion — is covered in Section 10 below.

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# 3. Institutional home: the relationship with the Institute of Chinese Studies

The Art Museum is no isolated gallery; it sits within CUHK's Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS). According to the ICS official page^※ and the museum's official history^※, the museum's original galleries were connected to the Institute, and the Institute's building encloses a Chinese-style garden courtyard.

What this institutional attachment means is that the museum's "collecting and exhibiting" and the Institute's "teaching and researching" reinforce each other — artworks provide the primary material for scholarship, and scholarship provides the depth of interpretation. It is a structure that echoes CUHK's founding spirit of "rooted in Chinese culture": in a "Chinese University", Chinese artefacts are not mere display pieces but living materials for teaching and research. The museum also produces interactive learning booklets for its exhibitions and runs companion lecture series, turning physical holdings into academic resources that general visitors and specialist researchers can use alike — which is precisely the core value that sets a university museum apart from an ordinary public gallery.

The Institute of Chinese Studies itself predates the museum. According to the ICS "About Us" page^※, the Institute was founded in 1967 and has ever since been CUHK's bridge to Chinese-studies institutions in mainland China and around the world; when the Art Museum was established in 1971, it joined that scholarly network as a unit under the Institute. The Institute now houses several specialised centres, including the Ng Tor-tai Chinese Language Research Centre, the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Chinese Culture, the Liu Ts'un-yan Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts and the Lingnan Culture Research Programme, with overseas bodies such as the École française d'Extrême-Orient attached as research partners. The Art Museum, for its part, works closely with the Department of Fine Arts and the Centre for Chinese Archaeology and Art, offering hands-on object study and in-depth research across museology, art history and archaeology. In other words, the museum is the one Institute unit that opens directly to the public and uses physical artefacts as its medium of teaching and research, whereas the other centres work mainly with texts, languages and publications. That division of labour casts the Art Museum as the branch of the Institute that "serves scholarship up for public viewing".

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# 4. Directorship and international honours: from James Watt to Josh Yiu

Whether a museum can keep turning a "private collection" into an "academic powerhouse" depends heavily on the succession of its directors. According to the museum's official history^※, the Art Museum's reputation as "one of the best university museums in greater China" rests on the leadership of four successive directors: James Watt, Mayching Kao, Peter Lam and Jenny So. Watt, the Oxford-educated founding director, was recruited by Dr. Lee of the Bei Shan Tang; the three who followed sustained the momentum, building the collection and scholarly reputation in tandem.

The current director is Josh Yiu, who holds a BA in art history from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Oxford, and who served from 2006 to 2013 as head of Chinese art at the Seattle Art Museum^※, specialising in Chinese art from the Ming–Qing period to the modern era, the history of collecting, and museum management. Under his tenure the museum completed the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion expansion (see Section 10), and in 2022 its "Time Travel・Hong Kong" project won the annual prize of ICOM's International Committee for University Museums and Collections (ICOM-UMAC)^※ — the first university museum in East Asia to receive the honour. The project began as an online tool accompanying the "Hong Kong Impressions" special exhibition: using Google Street View technology, it lets the public tour Hong Kong's historic art landmarks immersively from home, and during the COVID-19 travel restrictions it unexpectedly took on the role of reviving local cultural tourism. Yiu used it to make the point that technology need not be merely a subordinate aid to display — it can itself be a curatorial language.

The museum's tradition of public engagement, meanwhile, traces back to Dr. Lee of the Bei Shan Tang himself. According to the official history, in 1981 Dr. Lee founded the Friends of the Art Museum to broaden the audience base and rally community support; Friends serve as volunteers and docents and have raised substantial funds for education programmes, acquisitions and student scholarships, making it one of Hong Kong's earliest membership schemes run by a university museum. The museum's present opening hours (per its website) are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 10 am–5 pm, and Sunday and public holidays 1–5 pm, closed on Thursdays (except public holidays). Since 1971 it has continuously published bilingual scholarly catalogues and held regular symposia, and in recent years it has added a professional exchange programme for museum specialists, extending its teaching-and-keeping mission further into professional training.

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# 5. How big, exactly, is the Art Museum's holding?

The CUHK Art Museum currently holds more than 16,000 objects^※ (official museum history, as of the website's latest update) of artefacts and artworks, laid down by Dr. Lee Jung-sen of the Bei Shan Tang and built up by successive directors and donations from across society. It is now "presently regarded as one of the best university museums in greater China"^※ (the museum's own phrasing).

This model — a private treasure hoard as the foundation of a public collection — meant the museum opened with a formidable level of quality from day one, rather than starting from zero, and it is one reason the museum so quickly became a major Chinese-art institution in Hong Kong. According to the museum's official history^※, Dr. Lee led the building of the collection, both by donating choice pieces from his personal Bei Shan Tang holdings and by providing funds for the museum to acquire further works. The collection accordingly spans Chinese painting and calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, jades, seals, lacquerware, scholar's objects, furniture and more. Three special collections carry particular international scholarly weight: first, the more than 1,800 ancient seals^※; second, the Guangdong painting and calligraphy whose core is the over 1,000 works^※ donated by Jen Yu-wen; and third, the Ming–Qing furniture spanning the three regional styles of Canton, Beijing and Suzhou. Each is examined in turn below — for a finer-grained genealogy of the objects and their donors, see A Closer Look at the Art Museum's Holdings.

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# 6. The seal collection: why does it rank first among university museums worldwide?

The ancient seal collection of the CUHK Art Museum was built up through sustained donations of more than 1,800 pieces from the Bei Shan Tang^※ (accumulated since the museum's founding in 1971), and in both quantity and diversity it holds a leading position among university museums globally. The seals span from the Warring States, Qin and Han periods to modern literati seal-carving — a sweep of more than two millennia. From 28 September 2024 to 21 June 2025, the museum presented the exhibition "The Bei Shan Tang Legacy: Chinese Seals^※", drawing nearly 400 selected treasures^※ from its holdings and tracing the evolution of the seal along twin axes of type and historical development. The exhibition was arranged in eight thematic sections, covering seal form and materials, function, the official-seal system, private seals, general-purpose seals, religious seals, pictorial seals and literati-carved seals. A sample of the exhibits:

The Vice-Chancellor's words: then-Vice-Chancellor Rocky S. Tuan said at the exhibition opening: "The Bei Shan Tang Foundation has donated many precious artworks to the Museum, greatly strengthening the University's capacity to promote traditional Chinese culture.^※"

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# 7. The Ten Treasures of Bei Shan Tang: where did those Song rubbings come from?

The "Ten Treasures of Bei Shan Tang" donated by the Bei Shan Tang are the Song-dynasty calligraphy rubbings that scholars value most highly in the CUHK Art Museum's holdings. All are state-level precious ancient texts^※ — unique or best-available exemplars for the study of calligraphy history from the Han and Tang through the Song. The museum holds more than 2,000 rubbings in total, of which those recognised by the Ministry of Culture (now the National Cultural Heritage Administration) and entered in the "National Catalogue of Precious Ancient Texts" number over twenty^※ (per the latest exhibition figures, 2025) — also the first institutional holdings in Hong Kong to be listed. The "Ten Treasures of Bei Shan Tang" are the ten most representative pieces selected from among them:

From 23 September to 28 December 2025, the museum presented the dedicated exhibition "National Treasures in CUHK: Rare Rubbings of the Song Dynasty Donated by Bei Shan Tang^※". At the opening the director, Professor Lo, said of the state-level Song rubbings that they are "the University's true family heirlooms".

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# 8. Guangdong painting and calligraphy: why is the Jen Yu-wen donation so important?

The core of the museum's Guangdong painting-and-calligraphy holdings is the collection of more than 1,000 works donated in 1973 by the historian Jen Yu-wen^※, whose Ming–Qing Guangdong painters and founding works of the Lingnan School of Painting make this one of the most systematic public collections for the study of Lingnan art history. Jen, who had served the Nationalist government during the Republican period, used his scholarly background and connections to build a systematic collection centred on Guangdong painting and calligraphy. The timing of his donation was crucial: in 1973, only two years after the museum's founding, his bequest lifted both the size and the scholarly depth of the collection in one stroke. Today the museum holds more than 100 works by Gao Jianfu^※, which together with works by Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren and others forms a complete specimen archive for studying the Lingnan School.

The museum has organised several exhibition series around this material. From August to December 2021, "Artistic Confluence in Guangdong — Masterpieces of Guangdong Painting and Calligraphy from the Ming to mid-Qing (Phase II: Qing)^※" showed more than 70 works^※, focusing on Qing-dynasty Guangdong art collecting and literati gathering culture, and in particular the flourishing interplay of artistic patronage and scholarly conviviality during 1686–1842, when Guangzhou served as the centre of China's foreign trade. The exhibition covered three major Qing collecting networks:

From January to August 2022, "A Glimpse of Stylish Painting and Calligraphy of Guangdong Artists and Collectors^※" went further, presenting the parallel ascendancy of the Lingnan School (Ju Chao, Ju Lian, Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren) and the Chinese Painting Research Association (Zhao Haogong, Lu Zhenhuan, Huang Banruo and others), and including calligraphy by political figures such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen — a panorama of Guangdong's artistic milieu from the late Qing through the Republican era.

# A century of the Wong family's collecting enters the museum: another thread of Guangdong collecting

In 2025–2026 the museum is showing over 100 works^※ of painting and calligraphy from the Wong family — a private collection built in Guangzhou between the two world wars, and one of the last great Republican-era collections to enter Hong Kong public hands. The family's "Xiaohuafang Zhai" (小畫舫齋, 1902–1940s), set in Guangzhou, was an important salon where literati and artists gathered. The collection centres on Ming–Qing painting and calligraphy, and includes such masterworks as Wen Zhengming's Picture and Poems on Falling Flowers (c. 1554–1567), Bada Shanren's Copy of Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi's Calligraphy, Wu Li's Feng'e Shan Zhuang (c. 1684–1710) and Yan Song's Visiting a Temple in the Western Hills in running-cursive script. The family's donation of three generations of accumulated treasures to the CUHK Art Museum continues the Bei Shan Tang spirit of "private collections turning into public holdings", and adds another vein of Republican-era excellence to the museum's Guangdong collecting story.

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# 9. Ming–Qing furniture: how do three regional styles meet in a single museum?

The museum's Ming–Qing furniture collection is distinguished by setting the three regional styles of Canton, Beijing and Suzhou side by side; the special exhibition of June–September 2019 showed over thirty selected pieces^※ (dated from the 1700s into the early Republican era), presenting the regional diversity of traditional Chinese interior culture. Each regional style has its own character, differing notably in materials, structure and decorative vocabulary:

Cantonese furniture was the exhibition's centrepiece: its decorative style, fusing Western motifs, reflects the singular cultural position of Qing-dynasty Guangzhou as the gateway of China's foreign trade — a story that, together with the museum's Guangdong painting and calligraphy, forms a themed narrative of "the material legacy of Lingnan culture". The exhibition also displayed Qing export paintings from the Canton port and old Beijing genre paintings, setting furniture and painting in cross-category dialogue.

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# 10. The new wing opens in 2025: what did the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion bring?

On 21 March 2025 the museum's new wing, the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion^※, was inaugurated. Designed by the architect Rocco Yim, it cantilevers over the hillside in board-formed concrete; the Harold and Christina Lee Gallery offers a 4.5-metre ceiling height capable of accommodating large-scale works. The new wing opened with "Transcending Transience: Art and Culture of Late-Ming Jiangnan^※", mounted jointly with the Shanghai Museum and the CUHK Department of Fine Arts, showing 193 precious objects^※, nine of them first-class (Grade A) artefacts from mainland China travelling to Hong Kong for the first time. The Bei Shan Tang Foundation sponsored the exhibition and additionally donated to the museum a jade "box decorated with magnolia blossoms" dated 1561^※ from the Ming dynasty, continuing to enrich the permanent collection. The Lo Kwee Seong Fund and the Lee family funded the construction of the pavilion, and the Lee Hysan Foundation contributed a further HK$20 million^※ to support arts-education programmes.

Nor did the new wing stop at its inaugural show. From 21 November 2025 to 29 March 2026, the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion is presenting "Yuan Blue and White: New Discoveries from Jingdezhen^※", showing more than 400 Yuan-dynasty ceramics^※, a considerable portion of them blue-and-white shards freshly excavated at the Luomaqiao kiln site in Jingdezhen in 2023 and 2024 and shown publicly for the first time, with loans arranged in collaboration with the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, and comparative export wares recovered from the Trowulan shipwreck in Indonesia. The exhibition's particular distinction lies in its conservation approach: combining traditional ceramic-restoration craft with 3D printing, the museum has digitally reconstructed some of the damaged vessel forms, letting visitors see how "newly excavated" and "long collected" pieces corroborate each other within a single gallery. At the exhibition, the then Vice-Chancellor stressed that combining scholarly art exhibitions with cutting-edge research is what sets a university museum apart from an ordinary public gallery; the curatorial work was led by director Josh Yiu and associate researcher Wang Guanyu. The show also confirms the curatorial rhythm the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion has set since opening: from late-Ming Jiangnan painting to Yuan-dynasty Jingdezhen ceramics, the new wing has quickly settled into the role of hosting large-scale, cross-institutional collaborations.

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# 11. Significance, and a summary of the four great special collections

The Art Museum matters to CUHK on four levels. First, it is the embodiment of the University's founding mission: in a university founded on "Chinese culture", the museum turns that abstract commitment into a tangible, visible holding of objects. Second, it is a double legacy of architecture and art: the Pei-involved original building, the contemporary extension of the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion and the Bei Shan Tang-founded collection together make the museum significant in both architectural and art history. Third, it is a model of the unity of teaching and research: connected to the Institute of Chinese Studies (founded 1967) and its Centre for Chinese Archaeology and Art, the museum embodies the university-museum ideal that "collection serves scholarship, scholarship interprets collection". Fourth, it is a case study in institutional continuity: from James Watt to Josh Yiu, five successive directors, together with the Friends of the Art Museum volunteer scheme Dr. Lee founded in 1981, have given the museum both professional continuity and a base of community engagement — the institutional confidence that carried it to the first ICOM-UMAC university-museum prize in East Asia in 2022.

Further reading: A Closer Look at the Art Museum's Holdings: Seals, Guangdong Art and the Treasures of the Bei Shan Tang (a deeper dive into the objects and donors), an overview of museums and the campus ecology, Chinese Studies and Archives, and the gazetteer of campus buildings and venues.

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