Wai-kam Ho, Authority on Chinese Art
Hyfler/Rosner
Wai-kam Ho, Authority on Chinese Art, Dies at 80
By MARGALIT FOX NY Times
Wai-kam Ho, an art historian and curator considered one of
the world's leading authorities on Chinese art, died on
Tuesday in Shanghai. He was 80 and lived in Pittsburgh.
The cause was complications of diabetes, his family said. At
the time of his death, Mr. Ho was a guest curator at the
Shanghai Museum.
Trained in history and literature in China and in art at
Harvard, Mr. Ho was one of the first to apply the tools of
traditional Chinese scholarship to the Western study of
Chinese painting. He was an expert on Chinese painting as
well as on Chinese Buddhist art, which includes painting and
sculpture.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Maxwell K. Hearn,
curator of the department of Asian art at the Metropolitan
Museum, discussed Mr. Ho's influence.
"Professor Wai-kam Ho was one of the great scholars of the
field in the depth of his investigations, his command of the
literature - the vast literature of not only Chinese art
history, but also historical texts, regional gazetteers,
collections of poetry, random jottings," he said. "He was
famous for his ability to delve both deeply and broadly to
tease out information from these historical sources, which
weren't always an obvious place to look for information."
Wai-kam Ho was born on March 26, 1924, in the Guangdong
Province of China. He received an undergraduate degree from
Lingnan University in 1947 and did graduate work with Chen
Yinke, considered the pre-eminent historian of modern China.
In 1950 Professor Chen secretly arranged to send Mr. Ho to
the United States to study art history; Mr. Ho received a
joint master's degree in Chinese history and Asian art from
Harvard in 1953. From 1959 to 1983, he was curator of
Oriental and Chinese art at the Cleveland Museum; from 1984
to 1994 he was Laurence Sickman Curator of Chinese Art at
the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.
As late as 1950, there was little serious scholarship of
Chinese painting in the West. Chinese painting, which
focused on landscapes, looked to Western eyes austere,
forbidding and not representational enough. Weaned on
portraiture, Western art historians found the landscapes
almost impossible to interpret.
They were also difficult to date.
"When Wai-kam came to this country, the survival of actual
examples of landscape paintings from the 10th and 11th
centuries was widely questioned," Mr. Hearn explained. "Many
people thought that everything that had survived were
actually later copies that dated from the 15th and 16th
centuries. There were all these paintings, but there was no
way to prove that they were of an early date, so the whole
field was in a terrible morass. It was through the work of
scholars such as Ho that these paintings became anchored in
time."
Mr. Ho was an art historical detective. He once traced a
painting in the Cleveland Museum's collection to the
10th-century master Juran by examining an obscure inventory
seal in one corner. Mining the historical record, he
discovered that the seal was used only from 1083 to 1126 to
mark artwork acquired for the Song government's imperial
collection.
Mr. Ho's books include "Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The
Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368," with Sherman E. Lee (Cleveland
Museum, 1968); and "The Century of Tung Chi-chang,
1555-1636," with Judith G. Smith, (Nelson-Atkins Museum,
1992). Reviewing the 1992 work, The Los Angeles Times called
its two volumes "the year's most impressive paperback art
books."
Mr. Ho is survived his wife, Wai-Ching; a son, Kevin, of
Pittsburgh; a daughter, Dawn Ho Delbanco, an art historian
at Columbia University who specializes in Chinese painting;
a brother and a sister, both of Hong Kong; and three
grandchildren.