Tseng Yu-ho


Tseng Yu-ho, who is also known as Betty Ecke, was an artist, art historian and educator.

Biography

She was born in Peking, China. As the daughter of an admiral, she had a privileged upbringing. Tseng started painting when she was 11, when she was bedridden for 3 months with pleurisy. When she recovered, she began studying paintingwith the chief Manchu House representative Prince Pu Jin. She graduated from Fujen University in 1942, and then pursued graduate studies in Chinese art history and Chinese literature at Fujen University and Peking University. She married art historian Gustav Ecke in 1945. Tseng started receiving international recognition in 1946, when Michael Sullivan began praising and writing about her work.
The Eckes moved to Honolulu in 1949, where Tseng earned a master's degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and was the curator of Asian Art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts from 1950 to 1963.
In 1953, she received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study art collections in the United States. In 1954 the Smithsonian Institution toured her solo exhibition to ten museums. Tseng had a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1959. In 1972, she received a PhD in Asian art history from New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She taught Chinese Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from the 1970s to 1986. Yu-ho was one of the founding members of the Society of Asian Art of Hawaii.
She died in China on Sept. 16, 2017.
As an artist, Tseng Yu-ho is best known for her collages created by tearing and layering colored handmade papers. She called these artworks "dsui hua paintings". Seagulls from 1965, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of this collage technique.

Style and works

Tseng Yu-ho works vary across different mediums including traditional Chinese mount-making, calligraphy, and paintings. She started developing her "dsui hua paintings" in the early 1950's which would later become her signature style. Her work would later become more abstract but would still keep a connection to the classical Chinese cannon.

Selected publications