joy light

Look East: New Kalamazoo Institute of Arts gallery hosts Asian art

Updated: Jan. 21, 2019, 1:52 p.m. | Published: Aug. 29, 2010, 5:00 p.m. SHAPE  \* MERGEFORMAT

By Michael Chevy Castranova | Special to the Gazette

Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Strong art: The color woodblock print "Eyebrow Pencil" by Ito Shinsui

In Western paintings, artists typically fill the canvas with color. But in Chinese works, Joy Light explains, often some blank space is left.

She points to a piece on her living room wall that depicts a snowy mountain. The rocks are dark. But what of the white space surrounding them?

“That could be snow, clouds, the sky. The empty space,” she said with a smile, “is what you imagine.”

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts now offers a permanent place to contemplate such nuances of Chinese art as well as other works from Asia, in its new Joy Light Gallery for Asian Art, which opened Saturday. As part of the debut, some 135 pieces in three exhibitions of Chinese and Japanese painting and calligraphy are on display.

The gallery is a gift from longtime KIA supporter Timothy Light, in honor of his wife. The Lights also established an acquisitions fund, which allows for purchases for the permanent collection and pays for exhibitions borrowed from private collections, universities and other museums, said Vicki Wright, KIA director of collection and exhibitions.

For example, after the close of the “Strong Women, Beautiful Men” exhibit, with its 18th through 20th century work, the KIA will host a show of contemporary Japanese prints, Wright said.

The gift “enables us to represent the diversity of cultures here (in the Kalamazoo area) and around the world,” she noted.

“We live in an increasingly global world, and the lines between what is considered ‘American’ and what is deemed Asian, African-American, Hispanic, native American and so on are becoming more blurred as each culture continues to influence the life styles and arts of the other,” KIA Executive Director Jim Bridenstine said. “America is the melting pot of the world, and the KIA is proud to reflect that reality.”

Courtesy of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Joy Light was employed as a social worker until she became interested in art, taking classes at the University of Arizona and Ohio State University. She operated art galleries in Tucson, Ariz., and Columbus, Ohio, and has curated four shows of Chinese art.

Timothy Light is a former provost of Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University, as well as having been president of Middlebury College in Vermont. He began his teaching career at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was director of the University of Arizona’s East Asia Study Center and chairman of Ohio State University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literature. A great-grandson of The Upjohn Co. founder W.E. Upjohn, Light holds the title of professor emeritus of Chinese religion at WMU.

Bridenstine called the Lights both “generous” supports of the KIA.

Timothy Light said one reason for creating the Joy Light Gallery is that: “The KIA, as Jim Bridenstine has said, is the most important museum between Chicago and Detroit.” Expanding a collection of Asian art helps grow the reach of the KIA, which is known primarily for its American and some European holdings, Light said.

And then there is the “inherent beauty” and great diversity of Asian art.

“For China alone, in American museums there are pieces back to … 1700 B.C.,” Timothy Light said. “The huge volume of different mediums is so immense, if you had a museum (representing all of Chinese art), in somebody’s lifetime you wouldn’t cover the waterfront.

Handout photo.

KIA benefactors: Vicki Wright, right, the director of collections and exhibitions at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, celebrated at an art opening earlier this year with Timothy and Joy Light, two longtime KIA benefactors who have established the art museum's new Joy Light Gallery for Asian Art.

“The same is true of (the art of) India and probably for Southeast Asia.”

The Joy Light Gallery is intended to bring work “from everywhere in Asia. Next year, we’ll have Indonesian art. Eventually India and Pakistan.”

He also pointed out Asia’s growing economic and political importance — “It’s two-thirds of world.”

The gallery itself resides in the KIA’s lower level, in the room formerly occupied by the interactive gallery, which in turn has been relocated down the hall.

Its entranceway boasts dark bamboo on the floor. The patterned carpeting for the rest of the gallery is a green-gray, with oatmeal highlights, and the walls are almond colored.

Care was taken “to maintain a peaceful, kind of meditative quality,” the KIA’s Wright explained, in keeping with the art that will be displayed there.

After all, added Joy Light, who with her husband was involved with the design of the gallery from the beginning, “Chinese painting is not a thing to jump at you.”