The Tangs: 唐騮千 + 徐心眉

choi

Robin Pogrebin, New Donor Royalty Takes the Spotlight; With major gifts, Oscar L Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang land in the center of New York cultural philanthropy. New York Times, Jan 29, 2025, at pagre C2 (section C today is Arts).
https://dnyuz.com/2025/01/27/the ... into-the-spotlight/

Note:
(a)
(i) Remember my posting titled 長春真人西遊記 and dated Feb 17, 2024, about Oxford University Press (OUP) launching "Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature" on Oct 26, 2023?
(ii) The benefactors of the Library were/ are:
Oscar Liu-Chien Tang 唐騮千 (born in 1938 in Shanghai)
Agnes Hsin Mei Hsu-Tang  徐心眉

(b) "When the Metropolitan Museum of Art needed a major lead gift to jump-start its long-delayed new Modern and contemporary wing, they donated $125 million, and were given naming rights."
(i) the Met or
Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art
("That November [in 2021], the Met received a $125 million donation from Oscar L Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, the largest gift in the museum's history. In exchange, the Met named its modern and contemporary art galleries after the Tangs. * * * Mexican architect Frida Escobedo was hired in March 2022 to renovate the Tang Wing, and the Met had raised $550 million for the Tang Wing by 2024. Designs for the Tang Wing [by Escobedo, who was HIRED 2 1/2 years before] were announced that December")  (footnotes omitted)

With $550 million, one would think that Tang Wing was constructed from scratch. This, however, contradicts with "Frida Escobedo was hired in March 2022 to renovate the Tang Wing" (emphasis added). Which way is true?
(ii) Max Hollein, A First Look at the Designs for The Met's New Modern and Contemporary Art Wing. The Met, Dec 10, 2024
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/tang-wing-designs
Illustration 1 at the top appears in this NYT report. But please also view illustrations 2 and 3 from the bottom.
(iii) To understand the Met's architecture, one has to know its history.(B) Nonetheless, this announcement did not answer my question.
(A) The en.wikipedia.org for the Met: "The New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870 * * * The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue. [The museum moved one more time before setting on the current location: 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY] * * * After his death in 1969, the Robert Lehman Foundation donated close to 3,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Housed in the Robert Lehman Wing, which opened to the public in 1975 and largely financed by the Lehman Foundation, the museum has called it 'one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States.' "
• Armed with maps.google.com and museum's current address, you will learn that the museum sits on Central Park (thus City of New York owns the land, buildings and supplies utilities).
• Robert Lehman was a grandson of one of the three founders/ brothers of Lehman Brothers Inc (1850-2008).
(B)
• "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial was a series of events and initiatives celebrating the 100th anniversary of the charter of the Museum occurring between 1969 and 1971."  en.wikipedia.org for "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial."
• History of the Museum. The Met, undated
https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/history
("On April 13, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was incorporated, opening to the public in the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue. * * * The Museum's Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall, designed by the architect and founding Museum Trustee Richard Morris Hunt, opened to the public in December 1902. * * * A comprehensive architectural plan for the Museum by the architects Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates was approved in 1971 and completed in 1991. Among the additions to the Museum as part of the master plan are the Robert Lehman Wing (1975), which houses an extraordinary collection of Old Masters, as well as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art; The Sackler Wing (1978), which houses the Temple of Dendur; The American Wing (1980), whose diverse collection includes 25 recently renovated period rooms; The Michael C Rockefeller Wing (1982) displaying the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing (1987) of modern and contemporary art; and the Henry R Kravis Wing (1991) devoted to European sculpture and decorative arts from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th century.   With the expansion of the building complete [by 1991], The Met has continued to refine and reorganize its collection")
• From 1991 to the present, the Met has the same floor plan that we are familiar with. See Loic Tallon, The Future of Mapping and Wayfinding at The Met. The Met, Apr 18, 2016.
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspe ... ping-and-wayfinding
reproduced from Pinterest as this is more focused than the Met’s
(C) From 1987 onward, "Modern and Contemporary Art" has been housed in the 10 o'clock location which was Lila Acheson Wallace Wing but now Tang Wing.
• The current proposal is: Public Hearing Preservation Department – Item 6, LPC-21-04144[:] 1000 Fifth Avenue – Metropolitan Museum of Art, Borough of Manhattan. Landmarks Preservation Commission (announcing Feb 9, 2021 public hearing via Zoom)
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/lpc/d ... 00-Fifth-Avenue.pdf
(on proposal submitted to the Commission by Beyer Blinder Belle on Feb 1, 2021 Revision 3 on behalf of the Met on two subjects: ROCKEFELLER WING SLOPED GLAZING PROPOSED REPLACEMENT + DESIGN OF POTENTIAL  FUTURE REPLACEMENT OF TEMPLE OF DENDUR WING SLOPED GLAZING AND ROCKEFELLER AND TEMPLE OF DENDUR WING SKYLGHTS)
• The second illustration displays rooftop of the Met, and the third illustration, the various wings and their starting years (as opposed to various Arts) of the museum. You see that rooftop of Lila Acheson Wallace Wing is very different from that (rooftop) of Tang Wing (shown in Note (b)(ii) above). I believe that the caption of illustration 3 was wrong: Not the additions in yellow, but the buildings before master plan in yellow.
• Clifford A Pearson, Continuing Education: Remaking the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Architectural Record, Dec 6, 2024
https://www.architecturalrecord. ... litan-museum-of-art
, whose top illustration shows Michael C Rockefeller and Tang Wing.
• Met Plans a Gut Renovation of Its Modern Wing. New York Times, May 19, 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/ ... odern-art-wing.html
("Lila Acheson Wallace, a Reader's Digest founder and major patron of the museum who died in 1984, donated $11 million to the project")
This news report is locked behind paywall. I got the excerpt from Google search with her name.
Lila Acheson Wallace (1889-1984; Acheson was her maiden name) "co-founded Reader's Digest with her husband Dewitt Wallace, publishing the first issue in 1922."  en.wikipedia.org for Lila Acheson Wallace.


(c) "helping woo Gustavo Dudamel from Los Angeles * * * New York Historical was trying to complete its new Wing for American Democracy, which was already under construction, the couple donated $20 million. It’s now known as the Tang Wing for American Democracy * * * David H Koch, benefactor of New York City Ballet's renovated Lincoln Center home, in 2008; the private equity billionaire Stephen A Schwarzman, for the New York Public Library, in 2008, and a new cultural center at Yale, in 2015; and the entertainment mogul David Geffen, whose 2015 gift went toward the gut renovation of the former Avery Fisher Hall."
(i) Gustavo Dudamel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Dudamel
(ii)
(A) New York Historical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Historical
(" (known as the New-York Historical Society from 1804–2024) * * * The society was founded in 1804 as New York's first museum. * * * The New York Historical Museum & Library has been at its present location since 1908. The granite building was designed by York & Sawyer in a classic Roman Eclectic style. The building, along Central Park West between 76th and 77th Streets, is a New York City designated landmark")
, whose top photo shows facade facing left. The address is 170 Central Park W, New York, NY 10024.
(B) The current proposal is: June 15, 2021 Public Hearing Preservation Department – Item 3, LPC-21-08924[:] 170 Central Park West - The New York Historical Society, Borough of Manhattan. Landmarks Preservation Commission (announcing June 15, 2021 public hearing via Zoom)
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/lpc/d ... ntral-Park-West.pdf
(submitted by Robert AM Stern Architects on May 10, 2021 on behalf of New York Historical Society on the latter's "Renovation and Expansion": "By 2016, we'd exhausted the frontiers of our Central Park West building. * * * The new building [unnamed at the time] for which we seek approval will improve our ability to carry out the mandate that was set for us 216 years ago, allowing us to continue to thrive as New York’s great destination for American history in all of its diversity")
View the "2007" renovation )of facade)  of its exterior and the proposed expansion right below it, and you realize the new wing was to be built on the empty lot behind the original building. That was only proposal, which was modified for reasons unknown.
(C) Tang Wing for American Democracy. New York Historical, undated.
https://www.nyhistory.org/campaign-future-of-history

, whose first illustration displays artist's rendering (because it is not completed yet) of Tang Wing (buff/ nude color) and original building (covered by white granite).
(iii) "David H Koch, benefactor of New York City Ballet's renovated Lincoln Center home, in 2008* * *  and the entertainment mogul David Geffen, whose 2015 gift went toward the gut renovation of the former Avery Fisher Hall."

Lincoln Center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Center
(top photo showing David H. Koch Theater and David Geffen Hall, the latter displaced Avery Fisher's name)
(iv) "Stephen A Schwarzman, for the New York Public Library, in 2008"

New York Public Library Main Branch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Public_Library_Main_Branch
("Stephen A Schwarzman donated $100 million toward the renovation and expansion of the building, and the library announced in April 2008 that the main branch building would be renamed in his honor")


(d) in the couple's Manhattan apartment: "A monumental Gandharan Buddha dating to the third century sits in front of a 19th-century painting by Pu Ru, the noted scholar-artist prince of the deposed Manchu Qing dynasty. * * * An entire dining room wall holds a 1989 abstract expressionist triptych by the Indigenous artist Fritz Scholder, recently shown at the Met. * * * Douglas Dillon, the former Met executive who built up the museum's Asian wing. Dillon enlisted Tang's former brother-in-law, Wen Fong, a professor of Chinese art at Princeton University, as a consultant * * * A second triptych Hsu-Tang acquired long ago by the contemporary Navajo artist Emmi Whitehorse — whose work was shown at last year's Venice Biennale — anchors an adjacent guest room. * * * his [Oscar Tang's] father, Ping-Yuan Tang [唐炳源, 字 星海], attended MIT and later rebuilt the family business in Hong Kong [after they had lost it on mainland] * * * The Tangs married in 2013. Tang was widowed from his first wife, with whom he has four children; his second marriage ended in divorce. * * * Tang's gifts to the Met's Asian department include 20 important Chinese paintings from the 11th to the 18th century as well as the Song dynasty hanging scroll, 'Riverbank,' which ignited debate over its attribution. The Met's experts determined that it was by the 10th‐century artist Dong Yuan [董源]"
(i) Gandhara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhara
("was an ancient Indo-Aryan civilization"/ table: c. 1200 BCE–1001 CE)

The zh,.wikipedia.org translated it as 健驮逻国.
(ii) The en.wikipedia.org for Puru: "溥儒 (1896 – 1963), also known as Pu Xinyu 溥心畬 * * * he was a cousin to Puyi, the last Emperor of China")
(iii) Fritz Scholder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Scholder
(1937-2005; "In June 2022, Scholder's triptych 'Possession on the Beach,' * * * is exhibited in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City")

The 1989 triptych is found in the last photo of
Jennifer Vanasco, A Provocative Exhibit at NYC's Met Museum Takes a New Point of View. Hawai'i Public Radio, July 3, 2022.
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.or ... a-new-point-of-view
, though no Web source says that this is in the collection of the Tangs.
(iv)
(A) Wen FONG  方聞
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Fong
("Fong was born in Shanghai in 1930. * * * In the 1950s, Fong married Constance Tang Fong (Chinese: 唐志明), whom he had met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They had three children: Laurence, Peter, and Serena")
(B) 唐骝千
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/唐骝千
(section 3 家庭, which says he has had only two wives, the second was Hsu-Tang)
(v) "A second triptych Hsu-Tang acquired long ago by the contemporary Navajo artist Emmi Whitehorse [female] — whose work was shown at last year's Venice Biennale — anchors an adjacent guest room.""
(A) This sentence is ambiguous. It is unclear whether the triptych she owns is the same in 2024 Venice Biennale.

What appeared in that Biennale is titled
Outset, Launching, Progression. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (Date: 2015; accession number: 2015.32)
https://crystalbridges.emuseum.c ... unching-progression
, and owned by that museum.

Emmi Whitehouse. La Biennale di Venezia 2024
https://www.labiennale.org/en/ar ... neo/emmi-whitehorse
("In Outset, Launching, Progression (2015), Whitehorse responded to natural oil and gas fracking in Navajo territories. She followed the displacement and exploitation of Indigenous communities on Diné territories surrounding her upbringing. Whitehorse’s sensorial landscape mark-making techniques, presented through mystifying compositions, illuminate alternative strategies for preserving Indigeneity and resisting colonial violence and extraction")
(B) Another triptych of Whitehorse, titled "Earth Signs" and dated 1985, was auctioned in 2018 by Bonhams, whose estimated value before the auction was merely $1,000-1,500.
https://www.bonhams.com/auction/ ... h-earth-signs-1985/
The successful bidder could not be found in the Web.
(vi) Riverbank Attributed to Dong Yuan. The Met, undated.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39542

The Chinese name of the painting is 溪岸图.


(e) The NYT article carried five photios. Besides the one mentioned in Note (b)(ii) above and the facade of New York historical, the three additional photos were as follows, with its own caption.
• Oscar L Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tangat David Geffen Hall. home of the New York Philharmonic. They donated $40 million to the organization, its largest gift ever.
• The New York Philharmonic's debut at David Geffen Hall in 2022.
• From left, Michael Bloomberg, Oscar Tang, Agnes Hsu0Tang and John Rosenwald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gala in 2021.

choi

-----------------NYT
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art needed a major lead gift to jump-start its long-delayed new Modern and contemporary wing, they donated $125 million, and were given naming rights.

When the New York Philharmonic needed a meaningful contribution to endow its music and artistic director chair for the 2025-26 season, they ponied up $40 million — helping woo Gustavo Dudamel from Los Angeles — the largest endowment gift in the orchestra’s history.

And when the New York Historical was trying to complete its new Wing for American Democracy, which was already under construction, the couple donated $20 million. It’s now known as the Tang Wing for American Democracy, and is scheduled to open next year in time for the country’s 250th anniversary.

Oscar L. Tang, 86, and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, 53, have kept a low profile in the past, though Tang was the first American of Asian descent to join the Met’s board more than 30 years ago. But recently they have started giving more publicly and abundantly — with crucial gifts that have catapulted them into the center of New York cultural philanthropy, which remains dominated by white donors.

“Their giving is going to have a huge impact,” said Peter W. May, who serves with Tang as co-chair of the Philharmonic and with Hsu-Tang on the board of the New York Historical. “New York has gone through a rough patch — clearly Covid knocked us all — and there was a big question of whether the cultural side of the city was going to survive.”

With their gift to the Met, the Tangs entered the pantheon of game-changing cultural donations of $100 million or more, joining the oil-and-gas billionaire David H. Koch, benefactor of New York City Ballet’s renovated Lincoln Center home, in 2008; the private equity billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, for the New York Public Library, in 2008, and a new cultural center at Yale, in 2015; and the entertainment mogul David Geffen, whose 2015 gift went toward the gut renovation of the former Avery Fisher Hall.

The Tangs’ increasing prominence seems due to several key capital projects simultaneously coming to fruition and the couple’s effort to counter the anti-Asian discrimination and violence that escalated during the pandemic.

“We feel very much part of America, we’re very grateful to be Americans,” said Oscar Tang in an interview with the pair at their elegant, art-filled apartment overlooking Central Park. “The idea of giving back has always been very central, but to do it quietly.”

“During Covid, with anti-Asian hate, we realized that we should perhaps be a little bit more open about it,” he continued, “that we can set an example, that we earned our right to be part of this society, that we are an integral part of this society.”

Indeed, the Tangs come from generations of serious collectors. Entering their spacious, serene living room feels like walking into a museum. A monumental Gandharan Buddha dating to the third century sits in front of a 19th-century painting by Pu Ru, the noted scholar-artist prince of the deposed Manchu Qing dynasty.

In the dining room is a set of ancient Chinese bronze bells from the Warring States period atop a 16th-century Ming dynasty cabinet. An entire dining room wall holds a 1989 abstract expressionist triptych by the Indigenous artist Fritz Scholder, recently shown at the Met.

A second triptych Hsu-Tang acquired long ago by the contemporary Navajo artist Emmi Whitehorse — whose work was shown at last year’s Venice Biennale — anchors an adjacent guest room.

The two speak fondly and at length of their distinct journeys to the United States. Tang came from an industrialist family in textile manufacturing in Shanghai; his father, Ping-Yuan Tang, attended M.I.T. and later rebuilt the family business in Hong Kong, becoming one of the early financial and civic leaders in post-1949 Hong Kong, as well as a philanthropist dedicated to education.

Oscar was sent from Shanghai to the United States at age 11, after his family fled China for Hong Kong in 1949, during the Communist revolution. “I would walk on the street with my mother, and all of a sudden, she would just tug me to be close to her because we were walking by a dead body — somebody who had died of exposure and hunger,” Tang said of his childhood in war-ravaged Shanghai.

Upon first arriving in the U.S., Tang lived in the boys dormitory of his older sister’s school in St. Johnsbury, Vt. Out of a deep sense of debt to that small New England town, Tang would later support the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium there, where a new Tang Science Annex recently opened.

He went on to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.; Yale University; and Harvard Business School. Now retired, Tang was a co‐founder of the asset management firm Reich & Tang in 1970 in New York. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, with the crackdown on pro-democracy protest, he teamed up with the architect I.M. Pei and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, among others, to establish the Committee of 100, a Chinese American leadership organization for advancing U.S.-China dialogues and promoting the participation of Chinese Americans in America.

Hsu‐Tang, whose father is a scientist and mother a businesswoman, is descended from the 16th-century Ming dynasty imperial minister Xu Guangqi, a scholar and a collaborator of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who converted to Christianity in 1603 and was beatified by the Vatican.

Born and raised in Taipei, she came to Washington, D.C., at age 14 and was educated in the United States and England. An archaeologist and art historian, Hsu‐Tang received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and formerly served as a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge and Stanford. She has advised UNESCO in Paris as well as the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee under President Barack Obama. She is also the chairwoman of the board of the New York Historical and a former managing director on the Metropolitan Opera board.

The Tangs married in 2013. Tang was widowed from his first wife, with whom he has four children; his second marriage ended in divorce.

Tang’s association with the Met dates back to the days of Douglas Dillon, the former Met executive who built up the museum’s Asian wing. Dillon enlisted Tang’s former brother-in-law, Wen Fong, a professor of Chinese art at Princeton University, as a consultant and later as chairman of the Asian art department.

Tang’s gifts to the Met’s Asian department include 20 important Chinese paintings from the 11th to the 18th century as well as the Song dynasty hanging scroll, “Riverbank,” which ignited debate over its attribution. The Met’s experts determined that it was by the 10th‐century artist Dong Yuan, convening a symposium to address the dispute. Today, the Met website says that scholarly consensus in its favor has “grown stronger.”

The gift to the Met’s new wing was the Tangs’ idea and “came totally out of the blue during Covid,” said Max Hollein, the museum’s director, “when we were really worried about whether this project would actually go forward.”

Before Hsu-Tang’s involvement with New York Historical, Tang met Louise Mirrer, the museum’s president and chief executive, who invited his input for the 2014 exhibition “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” on the history of U.S.-China trade and immigration. Tang suggested that the show expand beyond the Chinese Exclusion Act.

“He showed that we had left out the story of the long history of relations between Chinese students and the United States and later arrivals like Oscar,” Mirrer said, adding that Tang ended up contributing artifacts like personal photographs as well as some financial support.

At New York Historical, Hsu-Tang was instrumental in developing the idea of devoting the new wing to democracy. “Benjamin Franklin was introduced to the text of Confucius by Voltaire’s writing, who was introduced by my great-great-great-great-grandfather,” she said. “We are all historically connected.”

The Tangs’ art collection focuses on Chinese art from the Bronze Age to 11th- and 19th-century literati paintings, along with abstract expressionist pieces by artists like Zhang Daqian, who in 2017 surpassed Picasso at auction.

Hsu‐Tang has been collecting and commissioning contemporary Indigenous works for more than a decade and loaned work to the New York Historical’s recent exhibition featuring the contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with the museum’s 19th-century Hudson River School paintings.

For a museum to feature art owned by the chairwoman of that museum can raise ethical questions, given that the value of that art is enhanced by such an exhibition.

Speaking generally, Claire Bishop, an art history professor at the City University of New York’s graduate center, said that museums often have a “cozy relationship to the collecting class.” Trustees, she added, can “lay on the pressure to show artists they collect,” although there was no indication Hsu‐Tang exerted any such pressure. Moreover, the Tangs were among several donors who in 2023 helped the museum acquire WalkingStick’s work, “Niagara.”

WalkingStick, in an interview, said the show “started with Agnes thinking about the work that was in the New York Historical and my work,” adding that “she had this vision of the interaction of my paintings with the Hudson River School artists.”

Hsu‐Tang said she only connected WalkingStick with the show’s curator, Wendy Nalani E. Ikemoto, who asked Hsu‐Tang to be “one of the lenders, and there were many.” She added that she had “no involvement” in the content or financial support of the catalog “so as to avoid any perception of self-interest.”

While several wealthy collectors treat their art as assets and have opened private museums, the Tangs said everything they own will be gifted to public institutions and that they have never sold any work.

“My father always spoke of these values — that paintings are not to be traded, that you own paintings for appreciation and not as a monetary asset,” Tang said. “If you sell them for commercial purposes, that’s a sign of decay.”

The Tangs are devoted fans of classical music and attend the New York Philharmonic’s performances weekly (their gift established the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music and Artistic Director Chair). “If you listen to a popular song, it grows old after a while,” Tang said, “whereas the classical never does.”

The two also own a home in Vail, Colo., where they spend summers and have supported cultural institutions. Tang, who started skiing there in 1965, helped establish the Bravo! Vail summer music festival as well as the Vail Dance Festival.

“Oscar is kind of a founding figure in believing in a place,” said Damian Woetzel, the artistic director of Dance Festival and president of the Juilliard School. “It allows for creativity.”

The Tangs think of their philanthropy itself as a form of creativity. “We get to create things,” Hsu‐Tang said. “Because we don’t have children together, these projects are our children.”