Center for US-China Arts Exchange


The Center for US-China Arts Exchange was a private, not-for-profit, national organization with the mission to promote greater understanding and mutual cooperation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China through interaction in the arts.
Established at Columbia University in 1978 by composer and Professor Chou Wen-chung, the Center was launched with initial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the . Later donors included the Starr Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and the MacArthur Foundation. The Chinese Ministry of Culture was the Center’s counterpart in China and funded the domestic expenses of many of the programs carried out there. The first U.S.-based organization to sponsor exchanges between the two countries solely in the arts, the Center organized projects designed to create a network of cultural relationships between two countries that had been estranged for thirty years.
Upon its establishment, the Center was supported by figures in the cultural sphere as well as in academia and the business world. Members of the Advisory Council included conductor Leonard Bernstein, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, playwright Arthur Miller, architect I.M. Pei, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, author Herman Wouk and Nobel Prize winning physicist Yang Chen-ning.
American figures in the arts were among those eager to visit China. Violinist Isaac Stern was the first, making a performance tour in 1979 with pianist David Golub. The Center arranged for a film crew to document their trip. The resulting film, "," won an Academy Award. Other prominent figures who made professional visits to China under the Center's auspices, were Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Ming Cho Lee, Alwin Nikolais and many others in all the fields of the visual, literary and performing arts. In 1990 the Center expanded its scope beyond urban centers to include programs of cultural and environmental conservation in rural Yunnan Province. Participants as diverse as architects, museum designers, shamanists and amphibian experts took part in projects to support the endangered lifestyle and landscape of Yunnan’s ethnic minority groups.
In 2018, the Center completed its role as program designer, facilitator and fundraiser, concluding forty years of innovative exchange work. The Center’s have been acquired by Columbia University’s and are available to researchers by appointment.

History

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.
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.
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.

Leadership

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.
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.
While working as Varèse’s copyist in the 1950’s, Chou received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct research on the history of the ancient Chinese zither, or qin, which, together with Chinese calligraphy, was to influence profoundly the essence of his musical style. In 1954, he completed a master’s degree in music at Columbia University where he studied under composer Otto Luening and musicologist Paul Henry Lang. He also composed many works throughout the decade, including a commission by the Louisville Orchestra. Premiered in 1955, “And the Fallen Petals” has become his most performed work today, played by leading symphony orchestras around the world.
Chou Wen-chung’s creative contribution was recognized in the United States early in his career. He received a music award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1963 and was elected a full member in 1982. His personal life also flourished in the 1960’s. He married concert pianist Chang Yi-an who later became an artist and teacher in the field of floral design. They had two sons, Luyen and Sumin. Chou began teaching at Columbia University in 1964; during his tenure of almost thirty years, he served in numerous leadership positions such as Chair of the Music Division and Vice-Dean of the School of the Arts. He expanded the cultural horizon in music education by presenting the University’s first graduate courses in Chinese Music and Asian Humanities and launched the doctoral program in composition, nurturing composers from around the world. By encouraging gifted composers from China to enroll, he spawned the first generation of contemporary composers from the mainland, including Tan Dun, Bright Sheng, Ge Gan-ru, Chen Yi and Zhou Long.
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.
Chou Wen-chung’s music manuscripts have been acquired by the in Basel, Switzerland, and are available for research at .
His personal 70-year collection of research publications have been donated to the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou. In November 2018, the conservatory opened the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center to house this collection of more than 1,500 works. The new center will serve as a platform to support emerging composers through international conferences and other research-related programs.

Board of Directors

Founder
The Center for US-China Arts Exchange established its first Advisory Council in 1981 and benefited from the guidance of professionals in the arts, academia, business and international cultural exchange. The membership revolved throughout the years and included the following illustrious members:
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.
Exchanges of Materials
During China’s thirty years of isolation from the west, and most intensively during the Cultural Revolution, both Western art forms and traditional Chinese genres were restricted or banned. Many libraries, publications and artifacts were destroyed. To address the need for arts materials, the Center sought donations from museums, music and art publishers and corporations, and carried music scores, recordings, art publications and literature to conservatories and arts academies. Chinese institutions provided the Center with publications about recent developments in China’s arts world and the Center assembled these into a resource library on contemporary arts in China.
Exchanges of Specialists
The core of the Center’s program was arranging for professional practitioners in the arts, teachers, research scholars, students, and arts administrators to take part in long- and short-term programs. Visitors typically offered lectures and master classes, held discussions with teachers and students, and visited local cultural institutions.
Clearinghouse Services
The Center provided free consultation and information to China’s Ministry of Culture and numerous arts organizations in China, as well as to American individuals, government agencies and organizations designing and carrying out self-funded programs in China on their own.

Early Programs for Master Artists

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 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; 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.
To accommodate large numbers, the Center organized “delegations” of up to twenty-five visitors at a time. Prominent figures in the arts world, although not accustomed to travelling on group tours, made the adjustment and signed up. 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.

Programming for the Future

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:
Arts Education East and West
In 1980, Vice Minister of Culture Lin Mohan led a Music and Art Delegation to the U.S. that made the contacts needed to launch a ten-year arts exchange program in arts education that sent teams of art teachers and scholars in both directions. On-site experience was combined with a research project supervised by educational psychologist Howard Gardner and Harvard’s —a unique research lab on creativity and leadership. The program led to new research topics among scholars in the United States as well as the creation by the Chinese government of a cabinet-level State Sub-Commission on Arts Education.
Music Mends the Rift
The rapprochement between the governments of the United States and China did nothing to diminish the animosity between Taiwan and mainland China; artists also reflected this estrangement. To address the rift in the music world, the Center convened a conference at Columbia University in 1988 that brought together composers from both Taiwan and mainland China with composers and music scholars from New York and other parts of the U.S. Ending almost forty years of estrangement, ten composers from mainland China and ten composer from Taiwan discussed issues of mutual interest and concern around the topic of “Tradition and the Future of Chinese Music.”
Pacific Music Festival
In 1990 the Center organized the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. The first event to bring together young musicians and composers from the Pacific rim, the event centered around a youth orchestra of musicians chosen from the countries that border the Pacific Ocean. The Festival was initiated by conductor and music educator Leonard Bernstein, who wanted to establish a Tanglewood-like music performance and education festival and center in East Asia. The youth orchestra performed in Sapporo and in other concert halls in Japan, with Leonard Bernstein at the podium. The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, shared the stage with the Youth Orchestra. The Center’s Pacific Composers’ Conference, which took place simultaneously, provided the groundwork for a series of workshops for emerging Asian composers. The conference was moderated by Chou Wen-chung and both young and seasoned composers from the U.S. and the Pacific region.

Beyond the Urban Centers

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.
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 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.

Publications

Articles