At age ninety-two, Chinese American calligrapher and painter Bertrand Mao credits his good health to his craft. It keeps him young, he says. And this year, it earned him the role of National Museum of Asian Art × Folklife Artisan in Residence.
Born in Jiangsu Province, China, Mao began his journey as an artisan at a young age. All Chinese students must learn calligraphy starting at age four or five. Even as a child, he enjoyed brushwork. “It’s almost without exception that a good Chinese painter is a good calligrapher,” he says. Later he trained with a friend of his father’s, though he never trained professionally.
His journey continued to Taiwan, where he lived for fourteen years, and then to Washington, D.C., where he moved in 1963 to study law at Georgetown University. Across countries and careers, through raising four daughters with his wife, he persisted with his artwork. In 2010, he shared his work at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, as part of the Asian Pacific Americas: Local Lives, Global Ties program, and in May 2024, he returned as Artisan in Residence.
For his residency, he traveled inside the Capital Beltway from his home in Rockville, Maryland. He recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march to the Lincoln Memorial and how he joined in support. When we walked around the Dupont Circle neighborhood, he pointed out his first apartment on R Street NW and remembered buildings that have been gone for decades. He knows his adopted hometown and the landscape well.
Mao mainly creates shan-shui paintings, a traditional Chinese style that depicts the environment or scenery. However, he does not refer to his paintings as landscapes. “It is not a focused perspective but rather has multiple focal points and perspectives. It is like a bird’s-eye view.” To create a painting, Mao uses traditional brushes made from weasel, goat, or horsehair, inks made with lampblacks bought in Anhui Province, and light pigments on rice paper.
In the early part of his art career, Mao helped form the Chinese Artist Association of Greater Washington, D.C. The group exhibited in libraries, galleries, churches, and hotels. After retiring from his career as the cultural counselor for the Chinese embassy, he became a resident artist at VisArts in Rockville and started teaching Chinese calligraphy and ink-brush painting. He still teaches a few days a week at his studio and local universities. With over thirty years at VisArts, he is the oldest practicing member.
During his Artisan in Residence program at the National Museum of Asian Art, Mao taught two Chinese calligraphy workshops, each scheduled to last two hours. But with all his knowledge and expertise, both lasted almost three! He prepared a forty-page packet, “Brief History and Primary Techniques of Chinese Shufa”—writing Chinese characters by brush with ink—and several other documents to help the attendees progress quickly.
“Calligraphy is not just fancy handwriting,” he reminds us. “It is cultural, poetic, musical, a beautiful form of art, like a painting.”
It is obvious Mao is a teacher at heart. During his residency, he prepared a sixty-four-slide presentation with details of Chinese history, philosophy, style, materials, and examples of his work. Wherever he is, he will comment on the brushstrokes and proffer admiration of another artist. This happened while we visited Up Close with Paul Cezanne at the Phillips Collection in Northwest D.C. The exhibition’s opening quote bears a striking similarity to Mao’s take on linework and landscapes: “To paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations.”
It happened again during our visit with local artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann at her studio, Stable Arts. Mao appreciated her large-scale mixed media pieces but quickly zoned in on her brush skills once he saw her smaller practice pieces of the Four Gentlemen, or the Four Noble Ones: plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum. Commonly seen within traditional Chinese art, these plants represent the four seasons and virtues in Chinese culture.
As a storyteller, Mao enjoys holding court with all these audiences. And in his stories, he has three pieces of life advice he likes to share. First, learn a skill to make a living. Second, learn human relationships. Lastly, foster an artistic hobby to enrich your life. By following his own advice, Mao’s life has certainly been a rich journey.
Beth Ferraro is the artisan coordinator working with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the National Museum of Asian Art Museum on this pilot program. She is the curator at Gallery Y at the YMCA Anthony Bowen in D.C., teaches chair yoga to seniors, and serves as an art and community consultant under the name The Art Island.
