Terry Welch on collecting modern Japanese art and being transformed
“I had a huge experience as an 11 year old,” says Terry Welch, the collector whose recent gift of artwork forms the core of the exhibition Transformation: Modern Japanese Art, on view through Oct. 15. “I saw a screen—Crows—at the Seattle Museum of Art and I remember thinking that some day I would have to go to that country to understand the artist who would paint a theme like 90 crows. And 12 years later I was there. So I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for museums, because they transformed me.”
The exhibition title describes not only the art in it, but Welch’s own life in relation to art and Japan. A renowned designer of Japanese gardens, when asked how he became interested in Japan, its art and culture, he says, “The story is quite unbelievable.”
In 1971, the Seattle native was headed to law school at the University of Washington. Welch was tuckered out from a fifth year at university, taking intensive Japanese and violin studies, and his father, who was the president of Boeing’s commercial aircraft division, suggested his son take a break before embarking on the path to a legal career. “My dad said, ‘I’ll put you on a delivery flight.”
Welch still wonders if his father ever regretted the decision. He got to Japan, and a 20-minute conversation with a stranger at a cocktail party wound up changing his life. “He told me to go to Northern Kyushu and look up an innkeeper who had a ryokan in the town of Karatsu, and in my naiveté, that’s exactly what I did.” Welch found the ryokan, and stayed there for the first six months of his sojourn. “I was seduced by Japanese culture and ultimately paintings and other expressions of their material culture.”
He then touched down in Honolulu to open East of the Moon, a gallery of Japanese art. Using money he had made selling a rare violin in Tokyo, he had purchased woodblock prints from his friend and art dealer Frances Blakemore, whose Franell Gallery was located in the Hotel Okura Tokayo from 1965 to 1984. The enterprise lasted 11 days. While he didn’t make it as a gallerist, he knew the life of an attorney wasn’t for him.
Back in Seattle, he waited for his father to return from a sales mission to Japan, worried about delivering the bad news. “The night he came home, we were in a quiet place and I said, ‘Dad, I just don’t think I can go to law school.’ I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Instead he put his arm around me and said, ‘Terry, the only thing your mother and I ever wanted for all of our children was to find their passion. You did it.’ And from that point forward I launched a 50-year career in Japanese garden design.”
He also started collecting Japanese paintings in earnest. “I was at the epicenter of Japanese painting in the United States, because we had [Japanese art history scholar] Paul Berry at the University of Washington, we had William J Rathbun as curator at the Seattle Art Museum, we had three major collectors,” Welch explains. “One thing led to another and I became fascinated and started collecting.”
Some of those paintings came to HoMA as part of a gift purchase in 2005 and were the focus of the 2008 exhibition Literati Modern. So while East of the Moon lasted less than two weeks, “in the end I did get my gallery in Honolulu,” chuckles Welch.
Building a collection
As a mentee of Berry and Rathbun, Welch gravitated toward their specialty—literati painting. “I admired [those artists] because to be a literati artist you have to be so immensely talented, you have to know Chinese, you have to write poetry, you have to know how to paint, you have to know how to teach,” says Welch. “Basically you live your life in such a way that is sets the standard for way we should be living.”
He has focused on “the painting energy and development since the Meiji restoration to early Showa, a period spanning 1868 to the 1940s. After US Commodore Matthew Perry’s forced opening of Japan to foreigners in 1853, “a number of influences came in from the west that hugely influenced Japanese painting,” explains Welch.
“There was exuberance, they threw everything out and started over again,” he says. “There was enormous attention to color and a new way of interpreting old ideas. [The Japanese artists] of the first 30 years of the 20th century have the courage to be vulnerable, which is my definition of bravery. They had a lot to lose. Many of them were born in the 19th century and were children of traditions that had continued. They had to take the big leap.”
As a designer of Japanese gardens, for years Welch took family, friends and clients on guided tours of the temples and gardens of Kyoto, which is also home to many art dealers, whom Welch met through Berry and Rathbun. “I always end up on a buying spree,” says Welch.
From dealers he moved on to auction houses such as Christie’s and Bonhams. He estimates that he has collected about 1,000 paintings over his lifetime.
How does an individual accommodate such a large amount of artwork? “It is easy. What people don’t understand is that you can take a 24-foot screen and fold it up like an accordion,” says Welch. “You see an enormous amount of surface area—I mean it’s as big as a Clyfford Still painting—and it just folds up into this little, tiny box.” In Port Escondido, he built a small museum in 2019 for himself, and his remaining collection of more than 300 works is stored in a space that’s no more than six feet by eight feet by seven feet high.
Finding a home at HoMA
Welch started visiting the Honolulu Museum of Art (then the Honolulu Academy of Arts) when he had his false start as a gallerist in 1972. He had dreamed of Hawai‘i since he was a boy. “I was born in the Pacific Northwest with seasonal affective disorder—so I can’t make dopamine. The only way to solve that issue in those days—fortunately there are drugs that work successfully now—was to be in sunny environments. So it was so easy to go from Japan to Hawai‘i.”
He always found time to visit the museum, because it is what he calls a “feel-good museum.”
“I categorize museums into two areas, either formal, linear experiences and kind of stuffy, and then there are the feel-good museums like HoMA. They are rare. It’s just the way you feel when you’re in the space. The integration of gardens in this layout is exceptional, the café deserves a Michelin star. There are many reasons.”
When in the early 2000s Welch decided to find a long-term home for his original collection by making a gift purchase, he courted museums such as Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museumand the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
Then came a visit from then Honolulu Academy of Arts curator of Asian art Julia White, followed by a visit from then director Stephen Little. “He said, ‘We would like to enter into a gift purchase with you for the collection.’ So that began my very close and intimate relationship with the museum—almost 20 years now,” says Welch.
He acknowledges collectors who preceded him in making HoMA a leader in the area of modern Japanese art—such as Patricia Salmon and her Taisho collection. Gifts like that, along with his own gift in 2005, spurred him to make another gift as he prepared to “flee America in 2019.”
“We already started this momentum [with modern Japanese art],” says Welch. “It’s unusual because there aren’t a lot of people poking around this particular period of Japanese art history. So it was my fervent desire to make an additional gift to, quite honestly, make Honolulu one of the epicenters for the appreciation and understanding of 20th-century Japanese painting. And [Curator of Asian Art] Shawn [Eichman] and [Curator of Japanese Art] Stephen [Salel] have been so supportive of this idea.”
He had decided to move to Puerto Escondido in Mexico and “had too many paintings.” He divided his collection in half and thought long and hard about what he would take to his new home and what he would give to HoMA. His decisions can be seen in the exhibition.
When asked how it feels to see his art in the museum, he recalls his initial reaction when movers came to his Bellingham home in 2005. “I had this terrifying feeling,” he says. “I sent an email to Stephen Little and said, ‘I wasn’t prepared for this, you took all my children away.’ And he said, ‘I know, but Terry, we’re going to take such beautiful care of everything and there’s going to be a lot of people who see these pieces and will be moved by them.’ So I had already been through that experience, but I think for me, in everything I’ve done in my life, whether it’s having designed and built houses or gardens or collected a variety of things, I’ve never felt possessive because I feel that they belong to everybody, all of these things as artistic expressions of people celebrating the magic of life deserve to be shown.”
A tale of two screens
When asked to talk about a favorite work in Transformation, Welch walks toward two large screens by Shirakura Nihō, who was hailed as one of Japanʻs most prominent contemporary artists during his lifetime. Called Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao on Mount Tiantai, they are a modern interpretation of an ancient fable.
“I’ve always gravitated toward painters who didn’t toe the line, who were kind of eccentric and crazy,” says Welch. “This work interests me for two reasons. One is here we’ve got something from the 1930s and 40s painted by a Japanese artist with a theme that originated in China.”
Welch is fascinated by Japan’s mastery of “the three A’s—adopt, adapt adept,” noting how for centuries the country adopted things from other places, then adapted them according to the way they viewed them in their culture, and then became adept at executing said thing.
“A modern example is the toilet. They adopted it, they adapted it, and now they’ve got them giving you stock tickers and checking your blood pressure.”
Welch is struck by the story “about these two dudes”—they’re bored with their village life, so head off in search of more amusing pastures. “And all of a sudden it’s the Shangri La story that is told over and over again—they find this amazing paradise in which they also encounter two beautiful women and everything is just perfect, as all utopias tend to be,” says Welch. He points to the paintings’ symbols, such as a peach in bloom, a phenomenon that happens only once every several thousand years, and allusions to Chinese painting and literature. He loves the beautiful, spare blue-green motif, which originated in China.
“But the greater story is they again got bored,” says Welch. “And they decided they had enough of paradise, so they went back to their village and it was 300 years later, all of their family had died. They were looking at the seventh generation of their family and they were mortified. Sothey reversed steps, started to go back to reenter this fantasy land and they were never seen again. There are several morals to this story. One is that the entire concept of eternity being spent in a tranquil, serene place is absurd, because it ignores duality, which is what we all have to live with in this universe. The second one, which means even more to me, is you can’t go back and that’s hard for a lot of us to understand. They were painted during World War II, and it was hard for Japan to come back after that major conflict. It also hearkens to this desire for countries to establish governments that lead to some kind of utopia and it’s just not doable. As hard as mankind tries, it ignores duality. And the artist has captured this perfectly in this fable. I think these are magnificent screens and they belong here in Honolulu.”
Posted by Lesa Griffith on October 9 2023