 aster curator and gallery owner Chang Tsong-zung -- aka Johnson Chang -- is almost rhapsodic over “the greatest Japanese invention.” The fuel efficient car? Takeshi Kaneshiro? The combo toilet-seat warmer-bidet?
 He fishes out a pen from the folds of his outer gray and inner white Mandarin jackets. Instead of a point, though, the Pentel QFXP has nylon bristles and writes like an old-fashioned Chinese ink brush. “Everyday brush writing,” Chang pronounces gleefully, as he demonstrates.
The Pentel is a simple tool in Chang’s current cause, to restore traditional Chinese culture to contemporary life. “We think of calligraphy as something which is preserved for calligrapher-artists,” he says. Yet in the past, “everyone used the writing brush,” he notes. “This [was] a wide gray area where people [could] be lifted out of mundane life into fine art, into ritual, li and culture.” His constant use of the Pentel, Chang says, has made his 10 and 12-year-old sons interested in calligraphy.
Integrating the old and new is also the point of his latest exhibit, created with the China Academy of Art’s Visual Culture Research Centre. “A Yellow Box in Qingpu: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space” includes paintings, sculpture, architectural models, videos and installations inspired by and displayed in newly built Ming and Qing style houses in Qingpu, outside Shanghai. Such vernacular architecture has mostly disappeared or been turned into a tourist attraction in China. But the exhibit aims to impart new significance to the wood houses as living and working places. “Yellow box,” coined by Chang, symbolizes display spaces or formats other than “white cube” museums or “black box” theaters or screening rooms.
 Culture“should be part of your life rather than something you have to take a conscious interest in,” says Chang, who has curated around the globe, including at the Venice and Sao Paulo bienniales. “I’m trying to remake a case for Chinese traditional culture through its possibilities for contemporary creativity.”
Although now focusing on centuries-old culture, Chang, 55, built his reputation as a pioneering promoter of avant-garde Chinese art. The list of his discoveries, which reads like a “Who’s Who” of modern Chinese artists, includes Gu Wenda, Liu Wei, Feng Mengbo, Zhan Wang, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi and Yue Minjun. "Art Review" twice named him among “The Art World’s Top 100 Players.” Chang “was absolutely instrumental in bringing Chinese art to Western audiences,” says Jane Debevoise, a former Guggenheim deputy director.
Son of an engineer and grandson of a Shanghai banker, the Hong-Kong born Chang says he was fascinated by art early on. He drew horses in pencil, following those in The Three Kingdoms comic books. Later he took lessons from famed calligrapher Feng Kang Ho, studied etymology and tried oil painting. But the rote teaching bored him, he says. "I never met an art teacher [with whom] I established good rapport” or could discuss what was a “good” or ”bad” painting. At age 16, Chang says he quit painting. Yet he was still interested in how art was related to modern ideas and cultural expression.
 Chang majored in math and philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts, though he was “very poor” at math. He took a freshman Western art history class. He spent most of his time absorbing philosophy, religion and history, including studying Confucian classics during a year-long break in Hong Kong.
After graduating, Chang returned to Hong Kong and his childhood passion. He began writing about art and met dealer and classical scroll painter Harold Wong [[Huang Zhongfang]] and his collector-father. Chang and Wong opened Hanart Gallery in the late 1970s to showcase classical Chinese painting and in 1983, Chang opened Hanart TZ (Chang’s initials) for contemporary art. The first Hanart closed in 1990, when Wong decided to paint full-time.
Hanart TZ initially emphasized Hong Kong and Taiwan artists. In January 1989 it opened a big show of mainland China pieces months before that art scene was put under a couple of years of censorship. Chang decided in 1991 to organize a comprehensive mainland China exhibit, and he and Li Xianting scoured the country for “China’s New Art Post-1989.” The exhibition, which traveled from Hong Kong to Australia and the US from 1993 to 1997, was a “milestone” and remains one of the most important exhibits of Chinese contemporary art, Debevoise says.
 Among Chang’s finds was Zeng Fanzhi, who then was tempted to abandon painting and earn a steadier income. Zeng agreed to sell a painting for 1500--and decided to stick to art when he realized Chang was offering $1500 not 1500 renminbi. Zeng’s pieces now sell for as much as $100,000.
Does Chang have a Midas touch, a special eye, or just lots of luck? “I just do the normal thing” when reviewing artwork, he says. “It’s firstly an aesthetic judgment,” or “it’s important in terms of art history” or innovation. Or, he adds, cracking a toothy grin, “because of ren qing, I can’t say no.” Chang notes that his personal collection of a couple hundred works includes non-sellers from his many non-commercial exhibitions.
Scores of foreign-owned galleries now operating in China diminish Hong Kong’s and Hanart TZ’s role of chaperoning mainland artists to the international stage. That’s fine with Chang. “The job that I was trying to do in the ‘80s and ‘90s is now complete”— namely, to “make Chinese artists feel they’re on a par with contemporary artists of the West, [who they] looked up to.The only way to resolve their sense of handicap [was] by being on the same platform as all these role models.”
“I’m not very keen on modernity,“ Chang says. “Things that we should keep, even just as inspiration and cultural memory, and to provide guidance and sense of direction for what we do in the future—we’ve destroyed all of it.”
Chang blames Mao and Sun Yat-sen and other post-dynasty reformers. The republicans “were too mesmerized by what they saw as the advanced culture of Europe and the West and too obsessed about the weaknesses of traditional Chinese culture,” he says. “They attributed all their own failures to historical and cultural reasons, which has left very big baggage and [was] a very good excuse for the Communists to just wipe everything out.”
 “For me, Arcadia would be traditional China,” Chang says. He dresses the part: loose-fitting, tailor-made jackets with frog-closures and raised collars, matching trousers, handmade leather slip-ons from Beijing. “My son sometimes asks his school friends to guess whether I’m his father or his grandfather,” Chang admits.
The artists Chang now champions meld classical culture into their work, such as Qiu Zhijie, Wu Shanzhuang and Hu Xiangcheng, architect of the Qingpu wood houses. Chang’s dream is to establish a community ceremonial or ancestral hall used for traditional rites, “a spiritual space” that is a link to “history, memory, and ritual performance.” He’s scouting canal villages around Shanghai for potential sites.“This is the most important curatorial project I see worth doing.”
When painter Ye Yongqing first met Chang at the National Gallery’s historic 1989 avant-garde show, they discovered they both were among the rare fans of Qiu Yacai.“Tsong-zung later sent me some books about Qiu,” says Ye, who has no commercial relationship with Chang.“He’s not just a businessman who cares about who’s popular.”
The Kunming artist calls Chang a contradiction.“He can promote to the international world,” but “he’ll tell me, ’I want to return to Suzhou to build a garden and bury my parents there.' In the Internet age, everything moves so fast. But Tsong-zung -- Johnson Chang -- has his own steps, and sometimes he can go back to the traditional world,” Ye says. “A scholar, a curator, a businessman or a culture-preservationist—he has all of these roles.”
translated by Wei Ying
image1: Monkey by Liu Wei
image2: Where:theater by Qiu Zhijie
image3: Amnesia and Memory:Television by Zhang Xiaogang
image4: Hospital Triptych No.1 by Zeng Fanzhi
image5: Banana(19) by Cai Jin
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