Click to Access
OUTSIDE China
Click to Access
INSIDE China
TRAVEL LINKS
Xiamen Gulangyu
Jimei Tong'an
Jinmen Z hangzhou
Quanzhou Wuyi
#1Fujian Sites!
Fujian Foto Album
Books on Fujian
Readers'Letters
Ningde Zhouning
Longyan Sanming
Putian Bridges
Travel Info,
Hakka Roundhouses
Travel Agents

MISC. LINKS
Amoy People!
Darwin Driving
Amoy Tigers
Chinese Inventions
Tibet in 80 Days!
Dethroned!
Misc.Writings
Latest News
Lord of Opium
Back to Main Page

Click Thumbnails below for larger images of Dr. Kaz' Paintings

"Fertile River"

"Hidden Lake"

"Intimate Landscape"

"Rich Fields"

"River Bend"

"Yellow River"

AmoyMagic--Guide to Xiamen & Fujian
Copyright 2001-7 by Sue Brown & Dr. Bill Order Books Xiamenguide Forum
Main Page Business Links Recreation Links Google Search E-mail
Introducing Professor Kazimierz Z. Poznanski
Click Here to E-mail Dr. Poznanski

Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, Professor
Jackson School of International Studies
PO Box 353 650
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195

Click Here for "Feeling China--Art as Jazz," by Dr. Poznanski
Click Here for Critics Reviews of Poznanski's Work
Click Here for "Chinese Beauty", by Dr. Kaz.
Click Here for list of Dr. Kaz' paintings
Click Here for Teng Hiok Chiu page (comprehensive biography, and pictures and descriptions of over 40 major works--all copyright by Prof. Kaz).
Click Here for "Happy Places: Landscaping by Teng Hiok Chiu" (by Prof. Kaz)
Did you know Xiamen is now one of the world's greatest producers of original and reproduction oils? Click Here for more info!
Back to top

Prof. Kazimierz Poznanski is both a collector of paintings and painter himself. He discovered these two passions in his native Poland and continued them after moving to the United States in 1980. He has been a professor at Cornell, Northwestern and since 1987 at the University of Washington. All the way along, he has assembled many paintings from the modernist period, while he also practiced painting himself. About ten years ago he started specializing in the collection of Chinese western-style paintings from the modernist period of 1920-1950. The core of his collection consists of a large group of oils by the Royal Academy graduate Teng Hiok Chiu (1903-1972). For the fist time since Chiu’s passing away, they were put on display at the Frye Art Museum in 2003. The show attracted forty-thousand visitors and brought this forgotten painter back in the spotlight. This interest in Chinese modernists turned Poznanski, an artist, to traditional Chinese “mountain and water” paintings on rice paper. His works, mainly monumental landscapes executed in the informed by Taoism Chinese art tradition, have been shown numerous times. They were exhibited in solo installations in 2002 at the Sichuan Art Museum in Chengdu; in 2004 at the Xiamen City Gallery in Xiamen; in 2004 at the “Art Center” in Seattle; and in 2005 at the “Upper Gallery” in Toronto, Canada. While in Toronto, he was interviewed by four different cable television channels. In 2005 the leading Chinese magazine “Art” directed by the China Artist Association prepared a feature article about his Chinese-style landscapes and published it in July 2005 issue with seven images of his landscapes.
Back to top

Poznanski’s understanding of art:

The role of art is to reflect the happy side of life, and it is life itself that the art should be focused upon anyway. While each individual life has some bad turns, there is no reason to be preoccupied with them. The fact of life, of our existence, is itself a happy occurrence. The continuity of life is made possible by the right choices we make. In other words, life continues only if we live in harmony with each other. Thus, the role of art is not only to project happiness, but also to stress harmony. There is perhaps no better genre to deliver this message than paintings of nature. It is so, since nature is life, and thus, it embodies both happiness and harmony. In recent decades this particular message has been largely lost in western painting. Western art has embraced a different, opposite message – that of distress and conflict. They reflect the horrific modern-era experiences – social revolutions, economic depressions and the world wars. While these are universal experiences, Eastern painting, as that of China, has preserved the message of happiness and harmony. In China, as well as in Japan or Korea, two nations that borrowed so much from China, this message is rooted in the Taoist philosophy. It is this philosophy that argues that nature is life, and thus each corner of nature is a happy place of harmony. Nature represents a moral order, where all elements – representing either yin or yang – live happily in harmony. What brings these various elements closest to each other is the feeling of love. It is thus love that the human life is a product of. Chinese traditional art, which takes the center place also in modern China, is completely in the service of spreading this moral message. This is why it is focused on mountain and water painting, where mountain, representing the male element – yang, meets water, the female element – yin, to become a unity. In keeping with this philosophical tradition Chinese, paintings show only the bright side of life. This is why these landscapes are incredibly peaceful, simply charming and filled with energy. My paintings are true to the basic principles of this tradition of “mountain and water” paintings, although they also look quite western. They are definitely “Chinese” in terms of their overarching message that life comes from love. But they are not equally “Chinese” in terms of technique. In tune with this tradition I always use ancient Chinese pigment applied on rice paper and I build my paintings with lines and flat spaces. However, my art not only looks more laborious, but also more colorful, more geometric and more vibrant than the typical Chinese landscape scrolls.

Art Critics Review Dr. Poznanski's Work
Back to top

Professor Jerzy Kolacz, Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art April 10, 2005, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
“I went to Kazimierz’s exhibition at the Upper Gallery in Toronto with mixed feelings. For an economist to also be a painter just did not sound right. I was afraid that I would have to witness another failed trial by an amateur artist. But I was nicely surprised. I found very interesting, large-scale synthetic landscapes that nevertheless were still filled with life and truth. Forms were defined by lines completed with color -- and all of this in a full harmony. Simplicity, deliberation and power of expression impressed me with their maturity. Not often would one see in these days so interesting a landscape painting. Nature often overwhelms the painter with its beauty and perfection. But here the artist offers a very intriguing analysis of nature and provides us with a logical description of what he has seen in a way that is free of banal emotions and references. In a conversation, the artist told me that he continuously faces a dilemma, namely whether he is an economist or an artist. To me, he has always been an artist, although this has not prevented him from being a well-respected economist. A person that is both thoughtful and tender can reconcile these presumably contradictory forms of creativity.”
Back to top

Raymond E. Tubbs, Art Critic, March 25, 2005, East Hartford
“I first met Kazimierz Poznanski in 1998, he a passionate collector of the painter, Teng H. Chiu (1903-1972), and I an art consultant who used to run his own gallery. Like Professor Poznanski, I have found this Chinese-born, western-trained painter to be an extraordinary artist with an extraordinary life. While his collection of Chiu paintings grew, our initial business-like relationship quickly evolved into one of mutual respect and friendship. In May of 2003, Professor Poznanski invited me to deliver a lecture at a symposium on Chiu at the University of Washington in conjunction to a large and handsomely presented exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The theme of my lecture was how this Chinese by birth, but very western artist, used a first-class education in western techniques of painting and art history to gradually reclaim and use his Chinese roots.

"While a guest of my new friend, I was invited by him to see some of his own artwork, which he had only recently been inspired to begin doing. To my astonishment I discovered this almost driven collector of Chiu's work had now also become Chiu's student. But not a mere student, but one of talent, and one of whom his master could be proud. Laid out before me on the living room floor was a wonderful surprise: two large groups of black ink drawings (around 9 x 12" each) -- both groups an intuitive series done with amazing spontaneity and sophistication.
Back to top

The first series was presented in a vertical grouping of nine rows of three vertical drawings each. Each work of the bottom row had, from top to bottom, one bold black line, surely done and placed. In the successive five rows, each of these beautiful lines developed into a fully realized plotted plant of spiky leaves on the top row. The viewer sees a black line become a potted plant, or in reverse a potted plant reduced to the single line that inspired it. The other and more complicated series consisted of three groups of three rows with three horizontal drawings in each. The drawings related to each other horizontally, with each row becoming slightly more complex. The bottom group of nine consisted of grasses or spiked leaves, and the next two groups with successively more complex or variegated vegetation with seed pots. The lines were applied with graceful confidence, and an intuitive sense of the rightness of their place in the composition -- a good thing, as there was no place to hide mistakes. I was truly impressed.

"In many ways the student began where his master left off. This becomes more evident in his color paintings of landscapes and towns or combinations of both where Professor Poznanski uses a limited palette -- tonal variation of only two or three colors applied in small areas or fields of a single color. The landscapes are broken up by painted lines into basic geometric sections, as are the buildings of towns and villages into their most simplified cubistic shapes. All the fragmented shapes of stylized simplicity are painted up to their defining lines. This is all very much influenced or informed by Chinese painting in general, and Chiu in particular. However one should be careful, including the artist himself, of not putting too much emphasis on the Chinese qualities of the work.
Back to top

Professor Poznanski does not limit himself to the Chinese philosophic sense of harmony in everything, which demands low key, carefully orchestrated tonal values, and drawing fused to the elegant dynamics of calligraphy. In "Ming Town Roofline," for example, the painting of village roofs in pale tones of soft blues and greens is saved from harmonic boredom by one dissonant note of bold yellow. Intuitively inserted in just the right place, it gives the work necessary dynamic vitality -- it makes it come alive. In "Purple Yellow" the layered floating mountains found in a traditional Chinese landscape are painted from top to bottom from yellow with some purple to purple with yellow. This masterful use of only two complimentary colors achieves not only the illusion of great perspective depth needed for this vertical panorama, but also the pulsating vitality of simultaneous contrast.

"The architectural cubes of "Green House - Gulangyu Island" are depicted with flattened perspective and devoid of any detail beyond their basic shapes. But the bold colors (again of a very limited palette) concentrated on both ends, and not the middle, of this very horizontal work force the eyes to jump from one end to the other, and thus the use of a very different type of dynamics brings this work to life. In a work like "Intimate Landscape," one can see Western sensibilities, perhaps even Polish, especially in the choices of often bold colors and their tonal dynamics unlike anything one would see in traditional Chinese art.
Back to top

"In certain profound ways, as Chiu was a Chinese man trained as a western artist, Professor Poznanski is a Polish man trained as a Chinese artist. And just as his western training eventually freed Chiu to reclaim his Chinese roots, I suspect Professor Poznanski's self teaching will free him to lay artistic claims to that of his western or Polish cultural heritage that allows for the expansion of inspiration, technique and points of reference. Regardless, Poznanski has the potential of being a recognized artist of distinction with an original and singular vision."

LIST OF PAINTINGS

Traditional Chinese pigment on rice paper

1. “Intimate Landscape”, 54 x 81, 2004

2. “Hidden Lake”, 54 x 81, 2005

3. “Yellow River”, 54 x 81, 2004

4. “Greenish Slopes”, 54 x 81, 2005

5. “River Bend”, 54 x 81, 2004

6. “Secret Ties”, 54 x 81, 2004

7. “Fertile River”, 54 x 81, 2005

8. “Ming Roofs - Langzhong”, 54 x 108, 2004

9. “Dancing Roofs – Near Beibei”, 27 x 54, 2004

10. “Reddish House – Gulangyu Island”, 27 x 54, 2004