From Shanghai to Ohio: Woo Chong Yung (Wu Zhongxiong), 1898-1989

Woo Chong Yung, (Wu Zhongxiong), (1898–1989), also known in the USA as C. Y. Woo, was a highly accomplished painter, calligrapher, and poet from Shanghai. During the 1920s to 1940s, Woo was at the center of China’s cultural world, feted in art circles in both Shanghai and Beijing. However, faced with political persecution in the 1960s, he migrated to Ohio before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Once in the United States, he became an active presence in the local community, teaching classes in Chinese painting and martial arts, exhibiting and lecturing in local colleges, and contributing his talents to local arts councils and ethnic festivals in Columbus and central Ohio. His lifetime works were collected exclusively by Cincinnati Art Museum and the Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University which, until now, have gone unseen by the public. This ground-breaking catalog illustrates Woo’s unique position in Chinese painting history. His remarkable experience of emigrating from China in the face of political persecution in the 1960s and becoming an American utterly transformed and reshaped both his life and painting.