Jung Ying Tsao

Biography

Tsao was born in Tianjin, China, in 1929 to a prominent family that became aligned with China’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. His father was named Cao Wenming. In his early years, due to the Chinese Civil War he migrated to Western China, then returned to the North, and finally in 1949, emigrated to Taiwan (Republic of China) to escape the Chinese Communist Revolution. In the 1950s, he managed his family’s collection of Chinese paintings and studied Chinese painting connoisseurship under noted art authority Li Lin-ts'an, senior curator at the National Palace Museum (Taipei). He attended law school in Taipei and became a lawyer, then a judge. In 1963 he traveled to the United States and settled in Berkeley, California. Soon thereafter he gave up the practice of law; he became a professional art dealer in the mid-1960s, establishing the art gallery Fine East Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1974, and dedicating the remainder of his life to the preservation and promotion of traditional Chinese art.

Projects and Collections

Although his family’s collection of Chinese paintings included earlier works, Tsao, while living in Taipei in the 1950s, began to re-focus the collection on more recent artists, in particular those from the “Modern Period” (1840 – 1966) such as Qi Baishi. He ultimately built a balanced and encyclopedic collection of Modern Chinese painting. He also assembled a comprehensive collection of seventeenth century paintings, a major collection of paintings by the twentieth century landscape master Huang Binhong, and a collection of Chinese seals that ranges from the Warring States period (475 – 221 BCE) through the twentieth century. Tsao has been recognized as a guiding force behind several important private collections such as The Richard Fabian Collection and The Michael Gallis Collection. Many works from Tsao’s collection are either parts of the permanent collection or promised gifts to museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Tsao’s collections, or collections he has built, have been prominently featured in numerous research, publication, and exhibition projects, including:

Publications

Exhibitions and Loans

Friendships and Recognition

Tsao was a younger contemporary and friend of the late collector C. C. Wang (pinyin: Wang Jiqian), who collected classical paintings, and thus, was competitive with Tsao only around collecting paintings of the seventeenth century, where their interests overlapped. Tsao also built lasting friendships with fellow art appreciators who lived in or travelled to the San Francisco Bay Area, including the artist Chang Dai-chien (pinyin: Zhang Daqian), professors of Chinese art history Michael Sullivan and Chu-tsing Li (pinyin: Li Zhujin) and their students Wan Qingli, Cai Xingyi, Britta Erickson and James Soong, scholar Fred Fang-yu Wang and the collectors Richard Fabian, Michael Gallis and Michael Shih. As China re-opened in the 1980s and 1990s, Tsao traveled there frequently, building friendships with the Shanghai Museum curators Xie Zhiliu and Zheng Wei, artists Li Keran, Zhu Jichan, Huang Junbi, Lou Shibai, dealer/collectors Robert Zhang (pinyin: Zhang Zongxian) and others. In 2008, Tsao was selected to represent all American collectors and give a keynote address at the first annual World Congress of Chinese Collectors in Shanghai. He was recognized by the organizers for collecting art not for investment, but rather, to elevate the spirit and nurture refinement.

After his passing in 2011, Mr. Tsao’s heirs established the Mozhai Foundation (in reference to Tsao’s studio name), a charitable family foundation dedicated to supporting research and educational programming in the field of traditional Chinese art and culture.