Audience members were engrossed in a Chinese “Where’s Waldo” game. They carefully scanned the expansive Chinese ink landscape paintings in this visual search, attempting to locate the diminutive figure of Huang Xiangjian hidden in waterfalls, chasms and sweeping mountain ranges within the very masterpieces he created.

The brushwork of 17th-century Chinese painter Huang Xiangjian was introduced by Elizabeth Kindall, professor of art history at the University of St. Thomas and leading scholar of Chinese painting, during a public lecture on March 20 at Scales Fine Arts Center.

Huang was an “average gentleman” at first glance from Suzhou. He is known for his extraordinary 558-day journey through 2,800 miles of China’s treacherous southwest in search of his exiled parents. Through both his paintings and footnotes, Huang recorded the perilous odyssey as an act of filial piety and artistic identity-building.

“He didn’t have a minivan,” Kindall joked, eliciting warm laughter from the audience. “He was just walking … through bamboo forests, areas with these huge caves and these amazing mountain scapes and waterfalls, dealing with bandits on the road, man-eating tigers, earthquake zones, areas carrying disease and soldier checkpoints […]. Can you imagine? He certainly was a filial son.”

Amid China’s dynastic collapse in the 17th century, Huang decided to leave his settled wife and children in 1652 for his missing parents, victims of a fractured world caught between the fall of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing. In the chaos, Huang’s parents fled from their home in Suzhou, a cultural hub of late Ming life, to the remote southwestern region of Yunnan. Huang lost contact with his parents for eight years and did not know if they were dead or alive. He set out anyway.

Years later, sunburned, suffering from an eye disease, long-haired and nearly unrecognizable, Huang reached the town of Dayao in Yunnan. He found out that both of his parents had survived.

After their reunion, Huang talked with friends, raised funds and arranged sedan chairs to carry his aging parents back to their home in Suzhou. However, they found out that only the walls of their house were left standing — the Qing troops had taken their home.

Huang was ashamed because he had nothing to provide for his parents. He did what many did during this period — “farming with the brush.” He turned to art. Specifically, he began crafting a public identity: not just as a painter or writer, but as a dutiful son.

Kindall argued that Huang’s paintings were not just landscapes, but a campaign — a deliberate project to promote himself as a paragon of filial piety. 

“Everyone [in China] had to be a filial son,” she explained, and Huang intended to reinforce this persona to “get gifts of rice and money,” governmental appointments and many other social advantages. People even sent their children to study under someone known for deep filial piety. This identity could sustain a family.

Huang and his supporters combined diary entries, commemorative essays and paintings. The diaries, rich with detail, possibly written on the journey or compiled soon after, document Huang’s journey. His friends wrote essays about his journey, printing them alongside the diary to broadcast his devotion. Through this story, Huang created not just an identity but a livelihood for his family.

“I would hope that all who read this will become more caring towards their rulers and fathers and not just let this admirable example go unimitated,” Kindall said. “May it be a lesson to us all.”

 In a more intimate dialogue, Kindall met with three Wake Forest art history students for an informal chat at Campus Grounds. Hosted in a small conference room in Greene Hall, the gathering offered a space for students to ask candid questions about Chinese art, graduate school and the role of material culture in telling stories across time.

Sophomore Kate Smith explored the relationship between landscape and flower paintings and their connection to garden design. She studies how gardens functioned as three-dimensional versions of landscape paintings, and how the two art forms influenced each other. She thought this topic was a little broad and still needed to be narrowed down.

For Kindall, whose own journey into Chinese painting began with a transformative class and a year spent in Taiwan, that winding path is the heart of what makes art history meaningful. 

 “You should never decide. Make your best choices — and then see what happens,” Kindall said.

Michelle Ye, a senior and art history minor, spoke about being a Chinese international student studying Chinese art through a Western lens. That hybridity was part of the appeal. 

“This subject kind of selected me,” Ye said. 

She started out interested in medieval European wall paintings, but later found her way back to her own culture through material analysis. She is still looking at how things move between places, like ceramics between China, Korea and Japan.

Kindall acknowledged that “transregional study is really on the rise.” She emphasized the value of not locking into a single path too early. “That’s good that you don’t have a plan,” she told them. “If you had a full plan, I’d be worried.”