Page 35 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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the participation of leading European experts. In the same year, the China Institute was

founded to foster understanding between the U.S. and China through education, and to

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promote the study of Chinese culture in America. Another significant event was the

publication of Benjamin March’s China and Japan in Our Museums (1929), a survey

report of American museum collections of East Asian art. March proudly announced in

the book, “…nowhere else in the world could Chinese and Japanese art be so

conveniently and exhaustively studied as in eastern America” (March 1929a, 1). March

also noted the comparatively small contribution that American scholars had made to

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Chinese art study and the lack of Chinese art specialists in American museums. The

fourth remarkable event was the loan exhibition of Chinese art at the Detroit Institute of

Arts, which not only showcased a wide range of Chinese antiquities but also indicated the

marked interest in early Chinese art. As the exhibition review observed, “Porcelains were

the first of the manual arts of China to achieve popularity in the West, but in recent years

students and collectors have become increasingly concerned with other and earlier

productions…Unusual opportunities and comparative monetary wealth have gone hand in

hand with increasing knowledge and appreciation to help many American individuals and

museum form distinguished Chinese collections.” (March 1929b, 4)

In China, though chaos and wars continued, art and archaeology initiatives as part of

the nation-building program gained momentum. In 1924 the National Palace Museum

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“An International Conference on Oriental Art,” Art News, October 23, 1926.
26 http://www.chinainstitute.org/about/history.html
27 See Chapter Three, p.156-7.