Wen Fong

Fong was born in Shanghai in 1930. As a child he studied under the calligrapher Li Jian (李健; 1881–1956). Fong held his personal calligraphy exhibition at the age of 10 and was acclaimed as a prodigy. He enrolled at Shanghai Jiao Tong University before moving to the United States to study at Princeton University in 1948.[1]

At Princeton Fong studied under Kurt Weitzmann and George Rowley,[1] and earned his B.A. in European history and M.F.A. in medieval art history.[2] In 1954, he joined the faculty of Princeton while still studying for his Ph.D.,[1][2] which he received in 1958. His Ph.D. dissertation on the history of Chinese art was published by the Freer Gallery of Art as The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven (1958).[2]

In 1959, Wen Fong and Frederick W. Mote co-founded the first doctoral program in Chinese art and archaeology in the United States,[1][2] which was expanded to include Japan in 1962. From 1970 to 1973, he served as Chair of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology.[2] He was a curator at the Art Museum of Princeton University for Asian art, and helped build the John B. Elliott Collection of Chinese Calligraphy, considered one of the best outside of China.[2] In 1971, he was named Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art History. He retired from Princeton in 1999, after a 45-year career.[2] He subsequently taught at Tsinghua University from 2004 to 2007 and Zhejiang University from 2009 to 2012.[3]

From 1971 to 2000, Fong also served as a special consultant, and later consultative chairman, for Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[2] At the Met, he had an influential debate with art historian James Cahill over the authenticity of The Riverbank, a famous 10th-century painting attributed to the Southern Tang master Dong Yuan.[4] It was purchased and donated to the museum by the financier Oscar Tang,[5] Fong's brother-in-law.[6] Cahill made an explosive argument that the painting was a fake created by the 20th-century master painter and forger Zhang Daqian,[4] while Fong disagreed with his finding.[1] The dispute remains unresolved.[4] Despite their disagreement, Cahill made a presentation praising Fong's scholarship and friendship at a 2006 Princeton symposium held in Fong's honor.[7]

Fong also served as Corresponding Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan and was elected as an academician of Academia Sinica in 1992.[8]

In the 1950s, Fong married Constance Tang Fong (Chinese: 唐志明), whom he had met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[1] They had three children: Laurence, Peter, and Serena.[3] Peter suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and killed a sushi chef in San Francisco in 2009. He pleaded guilty for murder, and was sentenced in 2013 to life in a mental hospital.[9][10]

On October 3, 2018, Fong died in Princeton, New Jersey, of leukemia, aged 88.[1]

• Streams and Mountains without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting, co-authored with Sherman E. Lee (Artibus Asiae, 1955; 2nd edition, 1967).
• The Lohans and a Bridge to Heaven (Freer Gallery of Art, 1958).
• Summer Mountains: The Timeless Landscape (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975).
• Returning Home: Tao-chi’s Album of Landscapes and Flowers (George Braziller, 1976).
• The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, editor (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980).
• Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliot Family and John B. Elliot Collections of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton University Art Museum, 1984).
• Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1992).
• Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (Metropolitan Museum of Art and H. N. Abrams, 1996).
• The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliot Collection, co-authored with Robert E. Harrist, Jr., et al. (Princeton University Art Museum, and H. N. Abrams, 1999).
• Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999).
• Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001).

Source:[2]

• Video of Wen Fong from Asia Society