Shain Library First Floor Exhibition Area and Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives
John W. Winkler: The Chinatown Etchings
John W. Winkler was born on July 30, 1894 in Vienna, Austria. At the age of sixteen, he emigrated to California. Despite never having practiced or even trained in art, he enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute in 1912, initially with an interest in cartooning. There, Winkler studied under the landscape painter Theodore Wares and the painter, muralist, and etcher Frank Van Sloun.
Winkler excelled at the Institute, focusing on etching and printmaking and drawing his subjects from the architecture and street life of San Francisco. To supplement his art income, Winkler lit gas lamps in San Francisco's Chinatown and the neighborhood soon became one of his favorite subjects. He produced plates on site, depicting its architecture, people and commerce during what was one of the most prolific stages of his career. During this decade, he was sponsored for membership in the San Francisco Art Association, and was also made a member of the Californian Society of Etchers.
In the early 1920s, Winkler travelled to Paris, drawing and etching the street-life and architecture of the city. He also etched the French countryside and cathedrals in addition to farms, houses, and street life in Normandy. Upon moving to London, Winkler created numerous plates depicting London life and shipping on the River Thames. After nearly a decade in Europe, Winkler returned to the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1920s. At this time, he created more prints and drawings and enlarged some of his etchings from the previous two decades, before embarking on his famous series on the Californian Sierra Mountain ranges. It was during the 1930s that he also started producing his Christmas card etchings. From 1936, he attended the esteemed National Academy of Design and was heralded the 'Master of Line' by some, and 'another Whistler' by others. For much of the rest of his career, Winkler devoted himself to other artistic pursuits, returning the etching full-time only in the 1970s.
This biography was substantially drawn from the catalog description by A. Rex Rivolo.
Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room
Lan Zhenghui: The Weight of Ink
Born in 1959 in Sichuan, Lan Zhenghui belongs to the post-Cultural Revolution generation of Chinese avant-garde artists who flourished from 1985 onward. Lan has been particularly famed for his oversized, monumental abstract ink painting in a style which Lan himself coined as “heavy ink." It utilizes bold and energetic brush strokes, conjoins the great tradition of Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and various trends of modern and contemporary experimental art such as Western abstract expressionism, but also pushes boundaries, transcends constraints of material and medium, and yearns for a free-spirited yet also structured expression that bears his own distinctive personal marks.
Lan Zhenghui: The Weight of Ink offers a glimpse into the evolution of Lan’s ink art over the past two decades. It features some of his very first “heavy ink” works created back in 2000, which were only briefly exhibited in China and Canada shortly afterward, and also some of his most recent works created in 2024 specifically for this current exhibition at Connecticut College, none of which had been previously seen by the public in the U.S.