When the Empresses Come Home: Discovering Chinese Art at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College
December 22, 2025 · Fei Wu
Walking through the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, I didn’t feel like I was simply visiting a gallery.
I felt like I was stepping into the world my mother has been painting for the last twelve years.
For most visitors, the Chinese collection at Davis is a window into history. For me, as the daughter of Xiang Li, an artist who spent decades restoring and reproducing ancient paintings at the Forbidden City in Beijing, it felt like walking into the living landscape of her Chinese Empresses collection — the world her women once touched, lived in, and ruled.
This visit became something more: a quiet homecoming across centuries.
A Collection That Feels Alive
The Davis Museum holds a significant Chinese art collection, spanning antiquities, paintings, historical photographs, and contemporary works. The pieces reach across dynasties — from the Han through the Song, into the Ming, and forward into modern and contemporary voices.
Among the highlights are:
- Antiquities from the Han to Song dynasties, including a major gift of 28 sculptures and decorative arts in ceramic, bronze, and marble. These include vibrant Tang dynasty sancai ceramics and refined Song dynasty yingqing vases.
- Ming dynasty painting, most notably The Immortal Magu (1368–1644), which underwent a major conservation project in 2023.
- Contemporary Chinese art, including works by Wang Keping and pieces shown in On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West (2006).
- Historical photographs — a travel album of 229 images from the early 1900s that capture daily life, religion, and industry in late Qing China.
Yet as I stood before these cases, it wasn’t only scholarship I felt.
I felt recognition.
Seeing the World of the Empresses
Every bowl, every vessel, every small ceramic figure reminded me of the women my mother has painted — empresses, consorts, and court figures rendered on silk with mineral pigments and centuries-old techniques. I began to imagine them touching objects like these, drinking tea from similar cups, offering incense beside vessels like the ones before me, moving through palaces filled with forms and textures just like these.
Watercolor on Silk
Some of these artifacts are 800, 1,000, even more than 2,000 years old. Suddenly, they weren’t distant or abstract. They were part of daily life. They had warmth. They had presence.
Through my mother’s paintings, these artifacts gained faces and stories. And through these artifacts, her empresses gained a world.
In that moment, the glass cases seemed to soften. History felt human.
Xiang Li and the Art of Carrying Time Forward
Before creating her own collections, my mother spent 40 years working at the Forbidden City, beginning in her early twenties. Her life’s work was to sit with imperial masterpieces — studying, restoring, and reproducing them so carefully that the spirit of the original could live on.
She learned how silk ages. How mineral pigments breathe. How a single brushstroke can carry a dynasty’s voice.
Watercolor on Silk
The Davis Museum’s collection reflects the same values she lives by: patience, respect, and a belief that art is not just to be seen, but to be understood.
As I walked, I could almost hear her explaining why a glaze pools in one corner, why a figure’s posture reveals its era, why restraint can be as powerful as grandeur.
This is not just history to us. It is memory.
Scholarship That Builds Bridges
The care behind this collection is guided today by Dr. Yuhua Ding, Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections and Academic Affairs, and the primary curator for Chinese and Asian art at Davis. Her recent exhibition, The Immortal Magu: A Sixteenth-Century Chinese Painting Up Close, reflects the museum’s deep commitment to conservation, research, and cultural understanding.
I noticed the mention of “world-renowned paintings conservator Jing Gao, the work combined traditional and innovative approaches to the restoration and the new mounting.” as part of this upcoming exhibit. My mom Xiang Li and Jing Gao first met at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China back in the 1970s. They worked together as colleagues before Jing relocated to Boston to work at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) as a conservator. Later in 2006, Xiang immigrated to the US and and we have always kept in touch with Jing, who has shown tremendous support for Xiang’s art in the New England area. We are incredibly grateful for our friendship.
My content partner Tripti Gore Chandorkar and I very much look forward to visiting this exhibition in early 2026.
You feel that care in the labels and layouts. The museum doesn’t rush you. It invites you to learn how to look — how to notice material, gesture, symbolism, and time.
It is education not as instruction, but as companionship.
A Living Classroom
At Davis, these works are not frozen behind glass. They are part of a living classroom.
Students study them directly, write about them, research their histories, and sometimes curate exhibitions around them. A Tang ceramic or a Song vase becomes a teacher — quietly shaping the way a young person sees the world.
I love the idea that centuries-old objects continue to spark new questions in new minds. This is how culture stays alive. Learn more about the Wellesley Method at Davis Museum.
Made Possible by Generosity
This collection exists because of generous donors and collectors, including the major gift that brought the group of 28 antiquities to the museum. Their belief — that these works should live where they can be studied and shared — made this bridge across cultures possible.
Access creates understanding. And understanding creates respect.
When the Empresses “Come Home”
As I stood there, imagining my mother’s empresses among these objects, a dream took shape.
What if one day Xiang Li’s original silk panels could be displayed inside the Davis Museum? Not as outsiders, but as returning voices — like hosting a gathering where the empresses “meet” the world that once surrounded them.
It would feel like a celebration. A reunion. A homecoming.
Watercolor on Silk
We would love to imagine opportunities for workshops, lectures, conversations, and hands-on activities — ways for students and visitors to step into this dialogue between past and present, artifact and painting, history and living art.
Not just to look. But to experience.
Why This Visit Mattered
For us at Xiang Li Art, this visit was deeply affirming.
My mother has spent her life preserving China’s artistic heritage. Now, in the United States, we work to share those stories — helping people connect emotionally with Chinese history through her empresses.
The Davis Museum is doing the same work on an institutional level.
Different paths.
Same purpose.
To build bridges across time.
Plan Your Visit
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is free and open to the public.
Address: 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays and during college breaks)
Winter Break: Closed December 16, 2025 – February 6, 2026
Info: +1 781-283-2051 or visit the museum’s website
A Bridge Worth Crossing
In a world that moves fast, the Davis Museum invites us to slow down.
To look closely.
To imagine lives once lived.
To let objects speak.
For me, it became a place where my mother’s empresses found their world again — across dynasties, across oceans, across generations.
And that is a bridge I will always be grateful to cross.