Interview with Artist Arnold Chang and Exhibition Curator Clarissa von Spee

Arnold, in the year following your seventieth birthday, the Cleveland Museum of Art is displaying a select number of your works in the exhibition Landscapes by Arnold Chang (Zhang Hong): A Retrospective and Recent Acquisitions (8 March through 9 November 2025). First of all, congratulations on this milestone anniversary, but also for your artistic achievements in all these years.

Thank you for your encouragement. When the show opens in March, I will have just turned 71. But the works in the exhibition and the preparation for the show, including this interview, all took place while I was seventy years old.

The museum is thrilled to have newly acquired your most published and exhibited work, Secluded Valley in Cold Mountains (see fig. 5), and I am eager to learn more from you about that painting. However, let’s start chronologically and talk about your early years, when you began practicing Chinese painting and got to know C. C. Wang in New York, in whose apartment you copied Dong Qichang’s Landscapes in the Manner of Old Masters, an album now in the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Can you expand a bit on your early years as an artist and the time you had with C. C. Wang as your teacher?

I am truly honoured that the museum has acquired Secluded Valley in Cold Mountains. I began my practice of Chinese brushwork by studying calligraphy with Wang Jiyuan (1893–1975) in New York while I was still in high school. As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, I spent a year in Taiwan, where I learned landscape painting from Guo Yanqiao (1919–2015). I received a master’s degree in Asian studies from UC Berkeley, where I studied the history of Chinese painting with Professor James Cahill. He introduced me to C. C. Wang, whom I had never met, although I grew up in New York. C. C. was spending a summer in San Francisco and teaching at the Chinese Cultural Center. After taking his two classes I decided to postpone my planned entry into the art history PhD program at Berkeley and returned to New York to learn painting and connoisseurship with C. C. Wang. Little did I know that I would end up studying with him for 25 years and never return to UC Berkeley.

During the first few years I spent two days a week at C. C.’s studio, copying original old master paintings and discussing the fundamentals of brushwork and composition, as well as art in general. It was a fantastic opportunity because he had the finest private collection of Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing paintings outside of Asia, and he allowed me to study and copy the original works. I was most fortunate to be able to copy Dong Qichang’s masterpiece album while it was still in Wang’s possession, before it was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I learned a great deal from copying this album (figs 2 and 3).

Not only did I gain a deeper appreciation of Dong’s brushwork techniques, but because each album leaf is modelled after a different ancient master, I learned to look at the old masters through Dong Qichang’s eyes, and I tried to understand how he transformed each model into his own unique vision.

The exhibition includes some of what I would call signature works in your oeuvre, immediately recognizable as ‘Zhang Hongs,’ distinguished by their fine, dry, lace-like brushwork and presenting at the same time elegant and sweeping panoramic views of landscape scenery. Examples in the exhibition are Secluded Valley in Cold Mountains and Chilly Mountains (fig. 4), which makes me wonder: When you create a work of art, what is the process, where do you start, and how long does it take you to finish a painting?

My process is different from many contemporary Chinese ink painters. I don’t begin with a clear image in my mind. I generally just start by making a few lines and then allow the brush to lead me. I react to the textures that naturally arise from the interaction of the ink and paper. As the brushstrokes accumulate, I try to build up natural-looking forms and mould them into a composition that is recognizable as a landscape image but is not a depiction of any particular place. I am most interested in the ‘flavour’ of the brushwork—the tactile quality of the lines and washes and the interaction between positive and negative space. I feel that this is close to the way the Yuan dynasty literati masters worked.

As far as how long it takes to finish a painting, a question that many people ask, my answer is twofold: the amount of time it takes to apply the ink to the paper can be minimal and measured in hours, but the length of time it takes to create a painting from start to finish may be days, weeks, months, or even years. Because I am applying ink onto absorbent paper with a brush, there is no erasing and no gessoing over mistakes. Although it is possible to paint darker ink over lighter ink, every mark that I make will still be visible in the final painting. The actual process of applying brush to paper needs to be quite fast in order to control the flow of ink, but deciding where each line and wash should go requires a great deal of thought and deliberation. When I started painting Secluded Valley in Cold Mountains (fig. 5), I decided to set up a video camera and hit the record button every time I began painting and hit the off button when I stopped. I ended up with eleven one-hour tapes, meaning it took eleven hours of actual painting time to produce that handscroll. But this took place over an intense three-month period, from June to September 2008. I worked on the huge painting Mapping the Universe (see fig. 9) off and on for more than a decade, even though there is not a tremendous amount of detail in the painting. I worked on it in spurts, a little at a time, year after year.

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Secluded Valley in Cold Mountains
Arnold Chang (American, b. 1954), 2008
Handscroll, ink on paper; painting section: 60 x 347 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art
John L. Severance Fund
Photo courtesy of Arnold Chang © The Cleveland Museum of Art

You once mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was a welcome time of seclusion that first stimulated your creativity, but after a while the isolation left its impression on you. Did it affect your art?

Painting for me is ultimately a very personal, solitary act. When the pandemic hit, I initially welcomed the privacy it provided and the fact that I could avoid unnecessary social interactions without having to make excuses. I felt free to work on my own timeframe, without interruptions. But after the first year or so, I began to tire of the isolation and the lack of ordinary social contact with other people. That feeling of isolation is expressed in Reclusion (fig. 6), a painting that feels somewhat unfinished. This painting captures that special ‘a-ha’ moment of creation where I felt that I had successfully configured all those random lines and textures into a compositional framework that works as a plausible landscape. I wanted to retain that spontaneous, ‘accidental’ quality of brushwork, so I felt it unnecessary to fill in all the details. At the same time the painting exudes the feeling of isolation and loneliness that many of us felt during the pandemic.

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Angles #2
Arnold Chang (American, b. 1954) and Michael Cherney (American, b. 1969), 2020
Photography and ink on xuan paper; painting: 61 x 144 cm; overall: 64.5 x 147.7 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Edward L. Whittemore Fund
© The Cleveland Museum of Art

You have collaborated with the American photographer Michael Cherney in Beijing to create a series of works that includes Angles #2 in the CMA’s collection (fig. 7). Cherney’s photographs of ‘real’ landscapes in China bring us back to the origin or DNA of traditional Chinese landscape painting, in which the tradition is rooted. Yet we have all been taught that traditional Chinese landscape paintings are ‘images of the mind.’ Is that a contradiction?

There is no contradiction. In fact, my collaborations with Michael Cherney confirm that the ‘images of the mind’ are deeply rooted in the patterns of nature. Michael’s photographs of actual landscapes clearly demonstrate that the so-called cunfa, ‘texture strokes’ of the ancient masters were techniques that they developed to render in two dimensions the patterns they observed in the textures of trees, rocks, and other natural phenomena. Michael’s knowledge of ink painting allows him to seek out and emphasize those natural patterns so that his photographs capture the feel of ink landscapes. The old masters of the Song and Yuan internalized these textural patterns and merged them with the aesthetics of calligraphy, creating a unique art form that reflects the interplay of visual perception and personal expression. Later artists could choose both ‘real landscapes’ and depictions of landscapes as source material for their own individual interpretations. Michael Cherney and I, both collaboratively and independently, continue this tradition. Angles #2 is one of my favourite collaborations because, in addition to blurring the boundaries between painting and photography, the geometric forms challenge the viewer’s perception as they toggle between two-dimensional and three-dimensional realities.

You have explored the potential of colour in your landscapes. Wang Yuanqi’s brilliant use of colour may come to mind when seeing Summer Landscape (2023, fig. 8). However, Wang applied colour to enhance the brushwork texture and blend landscape elements into a coherent mass. Your colouring seems to go beyond that, in that it has a vibrant effect, a lightness that almost illuminates the mountain masses. What is the role of colour in your paintings?

Wang Yuanqi (1642–1715) is one of my favourite painters, and I too love his use of colour. Apart from paintings in the archaistic blue-and-green manner, Chinese literati emphasized the use of ink in landscape painting. Colour was generally seen as a complement to the ink lines and washes and was added after the ink drawing was essentially completed. In most cases colour was used in a straightforward, topical way—green or red for tree leaves (depending on the season), brown for tree trunks, ochre for mountain plateaus, light blue for distant peaks, etc. Of course, some literati painters used colour in innovative ways—Shitao (1642–1707) was a great colourist—but for the most part, brushwork, bimo, literally ‘brush and ink,’ took precedent in theory and practice. Colour is more important than line in most western painting. I am intrigued by the way many European and American artists, especially abstract painters, juxtapose unmodulated, flat bands or patches of colour in a way that makes the canvas seem to vibrate. In Chinese ink painting the line itself creates the vibration. In my most recent work I am experimenting with combining these two kinds of vibrations in a harmonious way so that they work together to enliven the surface of the painting while maintaining their independent characteristics. Without consciously combining east and west, I feel that because I grew up in New York, surrounded by western art, perhaps my intuitive perception of colour is different from that of my Chinese colleagues.

Arnold, thank you for your time and expansion on the various works in the CMA’s retrospective exhibition, which take us from copies created in the early years of your artistic career to works that document your breakthrough as an internationally recognized ink artist to the experimental and collaborative works of later years. Let me conclude in wishing you ten thousand more years of creativity and health.

Thank you for your support. I feel privileged to have my work in the collection of CMA, which is home to so many great masterpieces of Chinese art.

Interview with Artist Arnold Chang and Exhibition Curator Clarissa von Spee

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