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March 4, 2004

UW professor goes from collecting to creating Chinese style art

The first American exhibit of Chinese style paintings by a UW professor is now on display at Seattle Pacific University. But the professor isn’t from the School of Art, nor is he Chinese. He is Kazimierz Poznanski, a professor of economics in the Jackson School of International Studies.

So, why is a Polish-born economist painting Chinese style landscapes? Well, it all started with his collection. “I’ve been collecting art for about 20 years,” Poznanski says. “I got interested in Chinese modernist artists from the 1920s to the 1940s, and especially in a particular artist called Teng Chiu.”

Teng Chiu (1903–1972), according to Posnanski, was one of the best of that era’s Chinese artists. Educated in Britain’s leading art school, the Royal Academy, he later moved to the United States and became a friend of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. But although he was perhaps westernized in his technique, the philosophy behind his paintings remained Chinese.

“Intimate Landscape, Near Beijing”, 54 x 81, water-based pigment on rice paper, 2003

“I began studying the Chinese philosophy as a way of better understanding the paintings in my collection and why I liked them so much,” Poznanski says. “This is how I learned that the traditional Chinese art, as Teng Chiu’s art, is almost always of nature and that nature represents a moral order.”

According to Poznanski, there are two basic elements, yin (woman) and yang (man), represented by water and mountains respectively, and the message is always about harmony. This, he says, explains why Chinese artists would mostly, if not exclusively, paint landscapes where these elements are harmonized into beautiful and peaceful images.

For many years, Poznanski was content to collect paintings and study the philosophy behind them. But four years ago he began traveling to China, where he met some artists and watched them in the studio. Soon he had acquired some rice paper and water-based pigment and was trying his hand at the technique. He has since had one exhibit in China and plans another, but the SPU show is his first in this country.

Still, Poznanski is a collector first and a painter second. A year ago, a group of 55 oils from his private collection of paintings by Teng Chiu was put on display for three months at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum. About 40,000 visitors attended the show.

Odd as the combination might seem to some, Poznanski insists there really isn’t a lot of difference between his intellectual and artistic lives. “In economics we solve equations,” he says, “and a painting is like that — a set of equations to solve. I apply rigorous rules on the paper to achieve harmony. When I make a stroke on the paper, I have to coordinate it with all the other strokes that are already there as part of an equation.

“It also reminds me of my classes,” he adds. “I regularly teach political economics, and I tell my students that in this field there are many competing views of the world, or paradigms that explain what makes this world work. Art is like that too. It projects a particular view of the world, and Chinese art offers just one specific view.”

Poznanski’s exhibit, called Chinese Beauty, includes a group of very colorful large-scale landscapes, some as big as 54 x 250 inches, mainly mountain and water scenes, often based on his life sketches but also inspired by old scrolls. It will be up until March 10 at the Art Center Gallery, Seattle Pacific University, 3 West Cremona St., Seattle. The hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.