The Center for US-China Arts Exchange was a private, not-for-profit, national organization with the mission to promote greater understanding and mutual cooperation between the United States and the People's Republic of China through interaction in the arts.
Established at Columbia University in 1978 by composer and Professor Chou Wen-chung, the center was launched with initial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. Later donors included the Starr Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and the MacArthur Foundation. The Chinese Ministry of Culture was the center's counterpart in China and funded the domestic expenses of many of the programs carried out there. The first U.S.-based organization to sponsor exchanges between the two countries solely in the arts, the Center organized projects designed to create a network of cultural relationships between two countries that had been estranged for thirty years.
Upon its establishment, the center was supported by figures in the cultural sphere as well as in academia and the business world. Members of the Advisory Council included conductor Leonard Bernstein, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, playwright Arthur Miller, architect I.M. Pei, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, author Herman Wouk and Nobel Prize winning physicist Yang Chen-ning.
American figures in the arts were among those eager to visit China. Violinist Isaac Stern was the first, making a performance tour in 1979 with pianist David Golub. The Center arranged for a film crew to document their trip. The resulting film, "From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China", won an Academy Award. Other prominent figures who made professional visits to China under the center's auspices, were Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Ming Cho Lee, Alwin Nikolais and many others in all the fields of the visual, literary and performing arts. In 1990 the Center expanded its scope beyond urban centers to include programs of cultural and environmental conservation in rural Yunnan Province. Participants as diverse as architects, museum designers, shamanists and amphibian experts took part in projects to support the endangered lifestyle and landscape of Yunnan's ethnic minority groups.
In 2018, the Center completed its role as program designer, facilitator and fundraiser, concluding forty years of innovative exchange work. The center's archives have been acquired by Columbia University's C.V. Starr East Asian Library and are available to researchers by appointment.
History
The Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange was established at Columbia University in 1978 as a cultural response to the political rapprochement of the U.S. and the People's Republic of China following a hiatus of thirty years. Founder Chou Wen-chung saw China's re-opening as an opportunity for resurgence of the arts in China. The stated mission of the center was to stimulate public interest in the arts of both countries to foster mutual respect. The strategy was to initiate systematic exchanges between organizations and individuals that would bring together creative minds from contrasting cultures and would benefit both countries.
Shortly after President Nixon made his historic trip to Beijing in 1972, Chou visited China for the first time since his departure twenty-six years earlier. China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and communication was restricted, but he managed to meet with old classmates from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and plant the seeds. In 1977, he visited again to give a lecture at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to an audience of cultural leaders and government officials. After his presentation, he proposed the establishment of an arts exchange program between the two countries. Officials put him in touch with Wang Bingnan, director of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a "people-to-people" agency. On the first of October of the following year, Chou signed an agreement with Wang Bingnan and the center was officially launched.
Three months later, on January 1, 1979, the United States and the People's Republic of China normalized diplomatic relations in an agreement signed by President Jimmy Carter. The Center then began to work directly with the Chinese Ministry of Culture to carry out a range of exchange programs focused mainly on professionals working in urban centers in the visual, literary and performing arts. In 1990, the Center expanded its scope to include programs of cultural and environmental conservation in support of ethnic minorities in rural Yunnan Province.
During the next forty years, the Center carried out exchange programs that ranged from single master classes in music to symphonic performances; interaction between several dancers, to the first performances of Balanchine ballets in China; and poets working with schoolchildren, to a joint Chinese-American PEN writers' symposium and the staging of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in Beijing.
In 2018, the Center completed its role as program designer, facilitator and fundraiser, concluding forty years of exchange work. The center's archives have been acquired by Columbia University's C.V. Starr East Asian Library and are available to researchers by appointment.
Leadership Chou Wen-chung, a composer whose sensitive melding of East and West led to the emergence of contemporary Chinese music, has had an impact on the development of modern music in Asia and in post-colonial cultures. As a music educator based at Columbia University, he nurtured young composers from around the world and trained the first generation of contemporary composers from mainland China. Simultaneously, Chou devoted the last forty years of his life to an unexpected career as cultural ambassador. In 1978, he established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, which organized a range of exchanges between arts professionals of the two countries.
Born in Yantai, China in 1923, Chou Wen-chung came to the United States in 1946 and studied composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston with Nicholas Slonimsky. He moved to New York in 1949 and began private lessons with the French-born composer Edgard Varèse, an eccentric and demanding teacher who became his artistic mentor. The same year Chou completed his first composition, "Landscapes," which is today seen by many as the first composition in music history that is independent of either Western or Eastern music grammar. Written for Western instruments, but inspired by Chinese poetry, "Landscapes" was premiered in 1953 by the San Francisco Symphony orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski, launching the young immigrant onto a promising career.
Chou revealed his goals of cultural diplomacy in 1978 when he established the Center for US-China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, collaborating with institutions and professionals in both countries on a range of exchange projects. The center's program continued for forty years, and its archives have been acquired by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. (See History section.)
Board of directors Founder Chou Wen-chung: (Director) 1978–2019
Columbia University Board of Managers Michael I. Sovern: (University President) 1983–1993 George Rupp: (University President) 1993–2002 Lee Bollinger: (University President) 2002–2018 Robert Goldberger: (University Provost) 1983–198 Jonathan R. Cole: (University Provost) 1989–2003 Alan Brinkley: (University Provost) 2003–2009 Claude Steel: (University Provost) 2009–2011 John Coatsworth: (University Provost) 2011–2018 Schuyler G. Chapin: (Dean, School of the Arts) 1983–1987 Peter Smith: (Dean, School of the Arts) 1987–1995
Advisory Council The Center for US-China Arts Exchange established its first Advisory Council in 1981 and benefited from the guidance of professionals in the arts, academia, business and international cultural exchange. The membership revolved throughout the years and included the following illustrious members: Leonard Bernstein (Conductor) Miloš Forman (Film director) Ming Cho Lee (Set designer) Cho-Liang Lin (Violinist) Yo-Yo Ma (Cellist) Arthur Miller (Playwright) I.M. Pei (Architect) Isaac Stern (Violinist) Audrey Topping (Author and photographer) Herman Wouk (Author) Yang Chen-ning (Nobel-prize winning physicist)
Programs The center's programs supported specialists in all the visual, literary and performing arts. At the time of establishment, three programmatic categories were announced: exchanges of materials, exchanges of specialists and clearinghouse services.
Exchanges of Materials During China's thirty years of isolation from the west, and most intensively during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), both Western art forms and traditional Chinese genres were restricted or banned. Many libraries, publications and artifacts were destroyed. To address the need for arts materials, the Center sought donations from museums, music and art publishers and corporations, and carried music scores, recordings, art publications and literature to conservatories and arts academies. Chinese institutions provided the center with publications about recent developments in China's arts world and the Center assembled these into a resource library on contemporary arts in China.
Exchanges of Specialists The core of the center's program was arranging for professional practitioners in the arts, teachers, research scholars, students, and arts administrators to take part in long- and short-term programs. Visitors typically offered lectures and master classes, held discussions with teachers and students, and visited local cultural institutions.
Clearinghouse Services The Center provided free consultation and information to China's Ministry of Culture and numerous arts organizations in China, as well as to American individuals, government agencies and organizations designing and carrying out self-funded programs in China on their own.
Early Programs for Master Artists
In 1979, China's sudden accessibility to American visitors sparked interest in the arts world. Once the opening of the center was announced, the office received requests from both the general public as well as from many distinguished artists and cultural figures who wanted to be among the first to go. At a time when few people were able to make arrangements on their own, the Center took on the role of organizing exchanges in the arts with China.
During the first few years of operation, the Center accommodated many requests from artists who wanted to travel to China. In 1979, violinist Isaac Stern made a performance tour across China with pianist David Golub, and the Center assisted in the production of the award-winning documentary "From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China." Arthur Miller directed the first Chinese-language production of "Death of a Salesman" with the Beijing Peoples' Arts Theater; and opera star Luciano Pavarotti performed in China for vast audiences—bigger than those for opera performances in the United States. George White of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center directed the Chinese-language production of the Broadway show The Music Man; the ballet works of George Balanchine, "Serenade" and "La Valse" were performed by the Central Ballet in Beijing for the first time. These performances and productions reached large audiences in China.