December 19, 2024 (Palo Alto, CA) – Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Victoria Yau: Mountain Cloud, a solo exhibition curated by Dr. Ellen Huang, Ph.D, former visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies and associate professor of art history and material culture at Art Center College of Design. Shanghai-born artist Victoria Yau (1939-2023) was one of the earliest Asian-American contemporary abstract artists, painting from the late 1950s to the late 2010s. During her lifetime, her work was shown at the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous other museums and galleries throughout the United States, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Yau’s oeuvre has been rediscovered posthumously thanks to the archiving and preservation efforts of her son, Philip Yau, and the in-depth research of curator Ellen Huang with graduate student Beryl Zhou.
Following recent exhibitions at Stanford University’s East Asian Studies Library, at Pen+Brush—a 130-year-old gallery for women artists—in New York, and a major acquisition by Northwestern University’s Block Museum, Qualia Contemporary Art is delighted to showcase over 50 years of work by Yau as her place in the art historical canon continues to be established. The exhibition will be open to the public from January 11, 2025, to March 1, 2025, with an opening celebration hosted on Saturday, January 11, from 4:30-6:30 PM PST. For more information, please visit www.qualiagallery.com.
Yau created over 700 works across multiple mediums, including abstract ink paintings, watercolors, collages, prints, and textiles. After immigrating to the United States in 1960, she transitioned from traditional Chinese landscape painting to abstraction, blending historical ink painting traditions with contemporary abstract expressionism. Her works, often exploring texture, line, and color, emphasize bodily presence and perception, while challenging conventional landscape depictions. Yau’s background in Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting, combined with her studies in philosophy and aesthetics, deeply influenced her approach to art. In addition to her visual practice, Yau was a prolific writer and poet. She wrote both academic texts – such as the use of color in the history of Chinese art – and poetry as a form of personal expression, often evoking distant and imagined landscapes.
The artist’s multifaceted practice, shaped by her diasporic experience and multiple cultural influences, illuminates the significance of multilingualism in the development of early Asian American and Asian diasporic art, as well as in global modernism. This exhibition seeks to reconsider her work as part of the broader context of postwar art history, highlighting the complexities of her transnational journey and her contributions to the history of modern art. Spanning over half a century of art-making in disparate locations of Chicago, Florida, Phoenix, and New York, Yau’s abstraction and material experimentation ask us to consider transformations in East Asian landscape painting from painted compositions to a distillation of form and line.
On view at Qualia are a selection of works that showcase Yau’s “mountain clouds,” the artist’s own reworking of the historical term for landscape, “mountain-water 山水 (shanshui).” Her monoprints, watercolor collages, and ink works, present landscapes in their most reduced, elemental forms. For example, Canyon from the Side and Mammoth Rock highlight textures in nature using color, collage-work, and material juxtaposition. Meadow and Rain (or Xaiu) play with linear mark-making through ink and printmaking techniques to depict blades of grass and rapid precipitation.
During the later years of Yau’s life, she returned to working with ink and further expanded her process of abstraction by engaging with material chance and effect. The interaction of ink and paper creates physical wrinkles that add a sense of movement along a diagonal in her waterscapes (Dancing Water, Flowing), rockscapes (Kissing Stones), and depictions of other natural effects (Dewdrops). Her fascination with abstracted landscapes manifests also in the simplicity of her bilingual titles.
In one of her poems, Yau begins by writing:
Mountains chase clouds
Clouds trail mountains
Echoing longing
(River Dream, 2005)
For Yau, the abstract and the poetic best conveyed her artistic intervention: landscapes of her own, the mountain clouds (Sea Dream). Qualia Contemporary Art looks forward to introducing visitors and the Palo Alto community to Victoria Yau’s legacy and remarkable, lifelong practice, and foregrounding the work of this seminal Asian-American female artist.
About Victoria Yau
Victoria Yau (aka “Vickie,” 1939-2023) was an acclaimed artist of a variety of mediums (acrylic, watercolor, fabric, and ink and brush) whose works have been displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the American Academy of Design (New York), the Illinois State Museum as well as some of Chicago’s once renowned art galleries, including the Fairweather Hardin Gallery and the Dorthy Rosenthal Gallery.
Between 1993 and 2006, Victoria’s works were also shown in solo exhibits in Tokyo, Japan (Shu Yu Gallery, Shirota Gallery, Kamakura Gallery), Tianjin, China (Nankai University), and Taiwan (Taipei Museum of Art, Cultural Art Center of Kaoshiung, Pristine Harmony Art Center, Color Field Art Space).
As Harold Hayden, the senior art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago, IL), wrote in the 1980s, “Victoria Yau is one of the brilliant artists who have found individual ways of expression using traditional techniques for modern purposes. She has great skills with the brush, keen observation for the character and moods of nature, and the gift to make visual poetry from her observations and her feelings.”
Born to a prominent family in China during a period of turmoil, Victoria was trained by some of China’s leading art instructors, most notably Professors Sun To-Zee and Fu-Chen Fu. She was educated formally at National Taiwan University (Philosophy), University of Puget Sound (Fine Arts, BA 1961), and UCLA.
Combining Eastern and Western philosophies into her art work, Victoria wrote, “The creation of my art work is like giving birth to my offspring. They are the daughters I never had…My emphasis is always to enrich the inner content of my creative project…Subtlety is often the basis for the serenity in my work.”
About Ellen Huang
Ellen Huang is a historian of art, technology, and material culture. She holds a BA from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Her research and university teaching integrate the applied and natural sciences with the history of ideas and art. She has held postdoctoral teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. In addition to teaching and research, she has curated Asian Art for the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Ackland Art Museum of UNC Chapel Hill, and with the collections at the Asian Art Museum SF.
She is currently completing a scholarly monograph about the theme of critical making through an exploration of Jingdezhen porcelain during the early modern and modern periods of world history (approx. 1600-1900). She is Associate Professor in Humanities & Sciences and Associate Chair of Humanities at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, where she teaches material culture and art and design history.
About Qualia Contemporary Art
Located in downtown Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, Qualia Contemporary Art is dedicated to showcasing outstanding established and emerging artists working in a variety of media. The gallery is committed to building lasting relationships with artists, collectors, curators, and scholars nationally and internationally, and providing a vital platform for dialogues on contemporary art and culture in the Bay Area and beyond.
Location
229 Hamilton Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94301
Gallery Contact
Dacia Xu
650-656-9132
Media Contact
Lainya Magaña, A&O PR
347-395-4155
Check gallery website for hours and additional info
