Artist: Victoria Yau (Chinese-American,1939-2023)
Title: Walk at Dusk
Date: 2009
Medium: Watercolor on paper
Dimensions: 13 3/4 × 10 3/4 in
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Gift of Estate of Victoria Yau.

“The creation of my artwork is like giving birth to my offspring. They are the daughters I never had…My emphasis is always to enrich the inner content of my creative project…Subtlety is often the basis for the serenity in my work.” – Victoria Yau

Victoria Yau (aka “Vickie,” 1939–2023) was based in Evanston, Illinois for six decades. Throughout her practice, her artwork continued to reflect and engage with traditional Chinese approaches. Born to a prominent family in Shanghai during a period of turmoil, Yau was trained by some of China’s leading art instructors, most notably Professors Sun To-Zee and Fu-Chen Fu. She was educated formally at National Taiwan University (Philosophy) and moved to the United States at the age of 21. She continued her studies at the University of Puget Sound (Fine Arts, BA 1961), and then at UCLA.

Yau’s work explores the threshold between representation and abstraction. Her work insists on retaining a poetic economy of forms, as views of nature are reduced to their most elemental characteristics. Yau’s subject matter across her artistic practice ranges from colorful landscapes to near-complete monochromatic abstractions, often depicting shorelines, sunrises, and sunsets, as well as environmental conditions, such as rain or snow. Her works in ink on paper, monoprints, and watercolors often condense landscapes or seascapes to large daubs of one or two colors, with their subject matter revealed or clarified through the work’s title. She often titled her works with poetic and evocative titles that refer to nature or an experience of nature, such as “Walk at Dusk.”

In 2024 The Block acquired five works by Yau: Close Encounter, Walk at Dusk, Water Steps, River Swell, and Large Stones, all of which exemplify the artist’s preference for poetic abstraction. Her work also shows an interest in materials, process, and experimentation.

Both Close Encounter and Walk at Dusk consist of a wide swath of color or white set apart from a darker background, perhaps representing a patch of clouds or a horizon line in each piece, respectively. In the last two decades of her life Yau focused more on ink on paper, pushing further toward an abstract vision with works that highlight the push and pull between ink and paper, and the intentional and unpredictable forms created by the interaction of the two. Water Steps, River Swell, and Large Stones are created by allowing saturated ink to flow and spread on paper. The dynamic interaction of ink on paper transforms the surface by creating buckles that add texture and a strong material presence.

Yau was also a poet and writer, and her economy of forms traverses across her varied media. The artist wrote: “In the last few years, during my journey searching for new visual expressions, nature’s basic shapes and forms (the circle, the oval, the line — wide and long, etc.) often haunted my dreams. Finally, these organic shapes and forms turned into a new vista and my new approaches became the echoes of my soul.”

As Professor Sandra Wawrytko has noted, “It is understandable that the artist often has compared her state of creative frenzy to Buddhist meditation, due to the shared sense of self-transcendence.” (Wawrytko 2024).

Yau’s work reflects Chinese traditions but also embodies a vital international modernist spirit. Her work represents the transnational experience of an artist who grew up in China and worked in the US. Yau’s artwork, which she referred to as her “daughters,” serves as a bridge between the artist’s two worlds and her experiences of immigration. It speaks to postwar cultural and geographic transitions, as well as the diasporic experience of a Chinese artist, woman, and mother in the United States.

Yau was a dedicated and acclaimed artist who worked across media (acrylic, watercolor, fabric, and ink and brush) and whose works have been included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the American Academy of Design (New York), and the Illinois State Museum. Throughout 2024, an exhibition of her work is on view at the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies. Having made her home in Evanston for decades, it is fitting that her work is now represented in the collection of The Block Museum of Art.

– Contributed by Corinne Granof, Academic Curator

Further Reading

• Stanford University Center for East Asian Studies, “Exhibit – 黛文洵美：山水記憶 Victoria Yau: ‘I slept in mountain cloud,’” 2024. Accessed May 28, 2024. https://ceas.stanford.edu/news/exhibit-daiwenxunmeishanshuijiyi-victoria-yau-i-slept-mountain-cloud

• Wawrytko, Sandra A. “Regarding Victoria Yau’s Artwork Past and Present.” In Victoria Yau, Water Resonant, 2009. 

• Yau, Victoria. “Biography.”  http://www.victoriayau-artist.com/biography

• Yau, Victoria. “Use of Color in China.” British Journal of Aesthetics 34, no. 2 (April 1994): 151–62.