Artist Biography
Born in Jiangyin, Jiangsu, Chen Chi was educated in Taiwan where she graduated from the Department of Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University. For many years, she taught high school at Gaoxiong and Taipei. Subsequently, she was invited to teach Chinese at the University of Washington at Seattle. She was also a part-time lecturer at Soochow University, Taiwan. When she was in her forties, Chen resigned from all her teaching engagements and began to study painting with Mr. Wu Wen-pin, specializing in paintings of “four gentlemen” (plum blossoms, orchids, bamboo and chrysanthemums) and drawings of women in the fine-line manner. Under the tutelage of Ms Lai Shu-shen, she also learned how to do landscape paintings and birds and flowers in the fine-line-and-color style. It was not until about twenty years ago that she joined the Lingnan School of painting and became a student of the renowned artist, Professor Au Ho-nien. In 1986, she studied bird-and-flower painting with Mr. Chiu Siu Ngon, a leading figure of the Lingnan School in Hong Kong, further refining her skills with brushwork and coloring. Chen gave her first solo exhibition at Taipei in 1989 and published a collection of her paintings, entitled the Chen Chi Painting Workbook. Her more recent publication is the Chen Chi Painting Collection.
Ting Pang-Hsin was born in Rugao, Jiangsu, and as a child lived in Hangzhou for a few years. Also a graduate of the Department of Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University, Ting went abroad for his postgraduate training and received his doctorate from the University of Washington at Seattle. He married Chen in 1963. An expert in Chinese linguistics, Ting was made the Director of the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Prior to his appointment as Dean at HKUST, he held many academic positions, including the professorship at National Taiwan University and the Agassiz Chair Professorship of Chinese Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Ting is a devout practitioner of Chinese calligraphy, a fascination that he has carried with him since he was a child and first took up the brush and learned to write in the style of Yan Zhenqing. To join his wife in this art exhibition, Professor Ting has agreed to display a few of his calligraphic works.