Chinese Treasures Shipped Out of Tacoma
A Museum, a Family, a Horrific History, and a Fight Right Now
A MANCHU NOBLEWOMAN’S EMBROIDERED SILK ROBE Mary Young, Connie’s mother, in the early 1980s, wearing one of the objects she donated to Tacoma Art Museum. The man is Jon Kowalek, then-director of the museum.
Connie Young Yu had no more than $11,000 to buy back her late mother's favorite red robe. The robe came up early in the sale, rising like a flame at the front of a room at Bonhams auction house in San Francisco last December. Embroidered with sprays of peonies, patterned butterflies, and gold medallions, the robe dates back to the Qing dynasty, in the 19th century. Bidding started, and Connie jumped in, but buyers whizzed past Bonhams's low estimate of $8,000, then past Connie's budget. A Chinese businessman bid $15,000. Sold. Just like that, the robe was gone, a half-century after Connie's parents rescued it and sent it to the Tacoma Art Museum to be enshrined as a symbol of reconciliation in the city where the mayor once called Chinese people a "curse" and a "filthy horde."
Losing the robe was the last straw. The Young family—Connie, her brother Al, and her sister Janey—announced a lawsuit against TAM on February 28. The museum had sent the robe to auction along with 131 other robes and jades donated by the Youngs in the 1970s and '80s.
Stranger Personals
The strands of that single robe stretch from the waning days of imperial China through the American civil rights movements, ending in that San Francisco auction room with the triumph of 21st-century Chinese wealth. The characters are vivid: Al broke the Asian color barrier in race-car driving. Connie is the granddaughter of a widow with bound feet who got locked up under the federal Chinese Exclusion Act. She's also the mother of an Oscar winner and a historian who writes books about the Chinatowns where her great-grandfather once raised money to fund the fighters who tore down the Qing dynasty, scattering imperial cast-offs like the red robe all over the globe for Connie's parents to later find.
The size and scope of the story—even more than the objects themselves—is what TAM underestimated when it set out to sell the Young collection. TAM either didn't know the story's value or didn't carefully consider how to handle its specialness. While the Young material did extremely well at the December auction, yielding $229,466, and is expected to do well again when more of it goes on the block at Bonhams on March 12, that amount of money is not spectacular on the art market—and the one thing both sides agree on is that this isn't about the money anyway. TAM spent two years deciding that building "the premier collection of Northwest art" is the smartest thing it can do with limited resources. The Youngs' unrestricted gift of jades and robes had not even been on display since 1996. It is fair game to be "deaccessioned." The museum did its due diligence, weighing options and contacting heirs—a courtesy, not a requirement, since an unrestricted gift is, legally, exactly that. The museum and family members had three face-to-face meetings and pleasant e-mail exchanges. Only after the auction did Connie and Al raise hell.
TAM director Stephanie Stebich says she was taken by surprise. Legally, it's hard to imagine that the family has a leg to stand on in its quest to stop the next auction and force TAM to transfer what's left of the collection to the Wing Luke or some other Northwest institution. TAM did not violate industry standards. This is an art museum, not a history museum, Stebich pointed out. TAM assessed the aesthetic value of the objects, found them expendable, and decided to sell.
Connie Wolf, director of Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, to which the Youngs gave the other half of their collection, says, "A museum is not in the business of keeping [a work] just because it's worth money." Amen to that. It's also true that privileged donors often mistake public institutions for their own private storehouses.
But do art museums have room to value factors beyond aesthetics? And are the Youngs really that kind of privileged donors?
This was not your typical local-scions-bequeathing-art situation. Connie's parents never lived in Tacoma. They chose Tacoma, at the suggestion of a friend who happened to be affiliated with TAM, because it was the site of the single worst act of anti-Chinese persecution in American history. It was the place where their pride could defeat a legacy.
That legacy was "the Tacoma Method." That's the name other towns gave it afterward, towns that also dreamed of kicking out their entire Chinese populations on a single rainy night, 600 people marched at gunpoint onto outbound trains. It happened in Tacoma on November 3, 1885.
In 1977, when TAM first exhibited the Youngs' objects, Connie wrote her father: "When [Al and I] were milling among the many distinguished citizens of the Northwest at the exhibit, we exchanged comments on the irony of it all, descendants of the discriminatory communities who forced out the Chinese crowding in to see the collection of Imperial robes donated by descendants of long-suffering Chinese pioneers... From a historical overview, the exhibit was a triumph, a sort of sweet victory."
So when you're shipping a bunch of Chinese treasures out of Tacoma, you undervalue factors beyond aesthetics at your own peril.
TAM prides itself on standing up for historically abused communities—see the case of the LGBTQ exhibition Hide/Seek last year. Tacoma was its only West Coast venue. Again, amen. The Young collection, though, is a case of an art museum proceeding legitimately in the art world but stumbling in the wider world where cultural sensitivity matters. Stebich denies telling Connie and Al that the collection was not museum quality, but a screen grab of the museum's own website from late last year describes the material as "not of museum quality" and "mostly tourist keepsakes and mementos."
Stebich says TAM will use some of the money from the Young sales to fund purchases by contemporary artists telling the Chinese American story. Labels on the new pieces would mention the Youngs. But Connie and Al say that has only been proposed recently, and they no longer trust TAM.
Too little, too late is why there were 52 signatories, including prominent community leaders, on a February 26 letter that called for a public meeting at the Asia Pacific Cultural Center in Tacoma. Kathryn Van Wagenen, a signatory who was president of TAM when it moved into its high-profile new home in 2003, says she'd simply like the museum to try to be "gracious," whether they're legally bound or not.
Stebich, meanwhile, is giving statements that will almost certainly make things worse. She told the News Tribune in Tacoma, "We are selling these items to build a collection that helps tell the story about the Chinese in the Northwest through art. Help me understand how Chinese imperial robes do that." But it's easy to imagine how keeping a least a few of the objects donated by this remarkable family would indeed help "tell the story about the Chinese in the Northwest through art"—while honoring the reconciliation gesture.
Stebich said the planned Asia Pacific Cultural Center meeting "was scheduled not in consultation with my schedule, so I have to decline the meeting." She said TAM's board president didn't plan to attend, either. The next auction is set for March 12. The same Chinese collector who bought the red robe has told Connie he's coming back for more. 
1
the link isn't specifically about The Tacoma Method or TAM, but it does have some pretty interesting insights into how city planning has codified some of the inequities in services that city sees.
4
The TAM likely thought it understood the message from the family about the sale in a more literal way. That said, the TAM may possibly not understand its place within Tacoma and its place within the history of the area as it relates to Chinese, or Salish or African American people either. But I don't know that the TAM is unusual in this regard. It usually takes a sensitive curator or administrators who are at least educable in terms of not stepping right in it.
While the pieces may not have met the "museum standard" an art museum also is aware that the story about works is as important as the nature of the work itself.
I feel badly for the family. The museum isn't technically in the wrong as far as museums go in its obligation toward unrestricted gifts. At the time of the donation, the family probably also wasn't aware of this potential outcome. The family is also 100% justified in feeling betrayed as their family pieces went up for bid and raked in a considerable amount of money for the museum. Poof, just like that, the meaning of the original gift and the symbolism of the holding were erased in a commerce transaction.
The two parties valued the story in different ways and while the museum was technically right, it is also understandably galling to realize that the TAM doesn't recognize or acknowledge the same things the family sees and more importantly doesn't see the need. They are just wanting to smooth it over as much as possible.
Western standards of art are often going to clash with cultural history and values of non-western cultures. To me artists and donors who are from non-Euro cultures should understand this distinction that TAM and other institutions like it will always make before they choose to do business with the institution. I can guess what some contemporary artists who is Chinese might produce as a result of this fiasco though and I really look forward to seeing it.
10
This article reveals something apparently gone wrong in the Tacoma art community and seems to have carefully exhumed the bones of a dead-as-done mistake by all parties involved. The examination and resultant text of the reportage seems well balanced, informative, and shows the parties under scrutiny sharing blame.
We can recall the article pointing out that the Seattle art community in some way sucks compared to Vancouver’s. We can recall the brazen honesty of an article that accused a local art critic of taking payoffs in the form of the works of an artist to write good reviews of that artist. We might ask were these exposés as balanced as the current one. And then there’s the recent article that would appear to just be telling the facts about a senior truly local artist, Charles Krafft, and find in its text really questionable statements that would seem able to harm the reputation and commerce of this artist, a reportage that leaves out so many good things about this man at hand in the evidence the article claims to use to obtain balance. In some theology there is the wise observation of the sin of omission. One might wish that this recent article on Charlie had been more fair and balanced and revealed more examples of his being quite a good person. We could have been treated a stronger revelation of how Charlie’s rather conservative beliefs don’t necessarily lead to an intelligent conclusion that he should be condemned for his associations. It could be said that the distinction of such nuances are important to any fair analysis. I can imagine some local artists being distraught over one of their own being so pilloried, worrying about what’s dirty in their laundry and wondering how their discursions or imprecise use of language might impact the public valuation of their work.
In this article it seems clear that the Young Yus were maybe quite naïve in their trust of the TAM system. (Nothing like museological management.) The only non-legal defense I think of for them is that one might say TAM had a responsibility to communicate to them the inappropriateness of such gifts to them and of Tam’s possible fickle nature in such matters. The Young Yus could have been pointed to the Seattle Asian repositories of such gifts such as SAAM, the Wing Luke and, maybe, the UW’s Burke. Also arising is the interesting reality of what might be a struggle for such cultural items between the old and new countries’ communities. Apparently old Chinese items are in demand by some of the new rich of China who on purchasing such items may be beginning a process that could return them, at some point, to Chinese museum collections. It reminds us of the historic phase when the Europeans rushed to collect the artifacts of the Middle East for their museum collections or the transporting of such items to a new country by immigrants. The question of where these things should reside is intriguing.
I continue to value and enjoy the writing in this column by this author and have no fantasy that we can always agree. I support her role in the local scene and only offer my point of view as a reflection.
gfinholt
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