The JSMA’s Soreng Gallery of Chinese Art underwent a long-awaited renovation in 2019-2020 facilitated through matched support from Betty Soreng and others who wish to remain anonymous. The largess of these donors made it possible to update the gallery floor, walls, casework, and lighting to a level commensurate with the quality of the collection. After this reinstallation, the Soreng Gallery features works spanning four millennia of Chinese history from the legacy collection of museum-founder Gertrude Bass Warner (1863-1951) along with exciting recent acquisitions. The display includes examples of the museum’s superlative Qing-dynasty (1644-1912) court textiles, Neolithic (2650-2350 BCE) through 19th-century ceramics, ancient and archaistic bronze vessels, Buddhist art, literati and professional paintings and prints of the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries, elegant decorative objects made of jade, glass, and crystal, and selected contemporary Chinese works including a selection of recently donated mixed-media works by the Chinese-born American artist Hung Liu. This installation celebrates the last century of cross-cultural engagement at the University of Oregon and heralds exciting future faculty and student research on the museum’s enduring and expanding collection of Chinese art.

Thanks to Gertrude Bass Warner, the JSMA has a solid foundation in the arts of Asia. In 1903, Warner traveled to China, where she settled and began amassing a collection of remarkable quality, complexity, and depth. Several years after she relocated to the U.S. she became a widow and moved to Eugene, where her son taught at UO’s School of Law. Inspired to support the university’s academic mission and foster cross-cultural understanding, she continued to collect Asian art, helped raise funds to build the art museum and support Asian Studies, and bequeathed her art to the state. Her idealism and generosity has inspired generations of donors to further augment the collection.