This artist’s visit and talk with Wang Tiande, the 2025 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow at Cornell, was presented in conjunction with an installation of his work in the Johnson Museum’s fifth-floor Rockwell Gallery (on view April 8–July 23, 2025).

Celebrated for his revolutionary takes on traditional Chinese art both in China and abroad, Wang Tiande is best known for his burned landscapes, consisting of a painted underlayer and an overlayer burned with cigarettes or incense sticks. More recently, he has incorporated landscape rubbings of famous ancient steles from his own collection. In their fusion of the fleeting and the timeless, Wang Tiande’s works meditate on creation and destruction. They are both elegies to the past and celebrations of its present persistence.

This event was cosponsored by the East Asia Program and the Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fund.