Yang Ling-fu

Yang Ling-fu (Chinese: 楊令茀, December 16, 1889 – September 4, 1978) was a Chinese artist.

Yang Ling-fu
楊令茀
Yang Ling-fu from a 1936 directory
Born	December 16, 1889 Wuxi, Jiangsu, China
Died	September 4, 1978 Carmel, California, US
Other names	Edith Ling-fu Yang, Edith Young
Occupation(s)	Artist, poet, curator, educator

Early life and education

Yang was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, the daughter of Yang Zhongji,^[1] a government official and diplomat. Her older brother, Yang Shounan [zh], was a poet, editor, government official, and industrialist.

Yang won a scholarship to study art in Philadelphia in 1924;^[2] she returned to Philadelphia in 1926,^[3] in connection with the Philadelphia Exposition of 1926.^[4][5] She also studied and taught in Peking. As a young artist she won medals from presidents Yuan Shikai and Xu Shichang.^[6]

Career

Yang was commissioned to make life-sized portraits of Manchu emperors and empresses for the Palace Museum of Mukden in the 1920s. She worked as a curator^[7] and was president of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts.^[4] She also wrote novels, poetry, and a book on Chinese cookery.^[6][8][9]

Yang moved to the United States before World War II. In 1936,^[10] she presented an exhibit of Chinese art at the Canadian Jubilee Exposition in Vancouver.^[4][11] She lectured and exhibited her watercolor paintings in California.^[2][12][13] She taught language, art, and cooking classes in various settings, including at the University of California, Stanford University^[14][15] and the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey.^[16] She created a set of handmade dolls to illustrate her lectures on Chinese art,^[4] and sometimes demonstrated finger painting^[17][18] played a flute,^[19] or wore Chinese gowns at her lecture appearances.^[20] She also made fundraising appeals for Chinese war relief and refugees.^[21][22] As a poet, she was associated with Poets of the Pacific, a multi-ethnic, multi-national group with an anti-modernist literary emphasis.^[23]

Personal life

Yang wrote a memoir, Sketch of Players, in the 1970s, including her oft-told anecdote about sending a pacifist poem to Adolf Hitler.^[24] She died in Carmel, California, in 1978.^[16]