Mai-Mai Sze

Yuen Tsung Sze (December 2, 1909 – July 16, 1992) — known as Mai-mai Sze — was a Chinese-American painter and writer. The Bollingen Foundation first published her translation of the Jieziyuan Huazhuan or The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting with her commentary in 1956.

Biography

Early life

Mai-mai Sze was born Yuen Tsung Sze in Tianjin on December 2, 1909.^[1] Mai-mai is a nickname meaning "little sister," ^[2] and this was the name under which she published all of her books. In 1915 she moved to London with her father Alfred Sao-ke Sze, then the Chinese Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The family lived there until 1921, when Alfred Sao-ke Sze was appointed Chinese Ambassador to the United States and settled in Washington D.C. Mai-mai Sze moved there with him and attended the National Cathedral School until 1927, when she enrolled at Wellesley College. At Wellesley, Sze studied the humanities, including English literature and composition, religion, philosophy, European history, and art. She graduated in 1931.^[3]

Career

Following her graduation from Wellesley, Mai-mai Sze's primary activity appears to have been painting. She exhibited a landscape in the 1933 Salon d'Automne,^[4] and also with Marie Sterner Galleries.^[5] Sze also worked as a graphic designer. In a letter to Dorothy Norman, Sze wrote: "I started... as a painter, did a lot of illustrating, ads, designs for packaging, materials, wallpapers...."^[6] She illustrated her autobiography, Echo of a Cry.^[7] In the same letter to Norman, Sze mentions working also in theater. She made her first and only appearance as an actress in 1936, playing the Honorable Reader in Lady Precious Stream by Hsiung Shih-I.^[8]

Sze was notably photographed by several important artists, including Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, and Dorothy Norman. Some of these photographs were published in fashion magazines including Vogue; it is unclear whether or not modeling was one facet of her career.

Sze also engaged in political affairs as an active advocate for war relief in China, and as writer and speaker on foreign relations with the Far East. In 1944, she published a pamphlet on China, the second in the International Relations Series published by Western Reserve University Press, at the request of Dorothy Norman.^[9] During the Second Sino-Japanese War and throughout World War II, Sze traveled in America lecturing on China and organized the Chinese War Relief Committee in New York. She also published a regular column, "East-West" in the New York Post during this time.^[10]

There is little documentation of Sze's relationship with the costume designer Irene Sharaff. The two women were living together at the time of Sze's death in 1992, and they coordinated the donation of their personal collections of books to the New York Society Library together, in 1989.^[11] In his history of the Bollingen Foundation, William McGuire wrote that Sze and Sharaff were both students of Natacha Rambova, who held private classes in comparative religion, symbolism, and Theosophy in her New York apartment in the 1930s.^[12]

Mai-mai Sze died in New York Hospital on July 16, 1992, at age 82.

Works

• Sze, Mai-mai. China. Cleveland, Ohio: Western Reserve University Press, 1944. Print. Toward a Democratic Foreign Policy. Reference Pamphlet no. 2.
• Sze, Mai-mai. Echo of a Cry: A Story Which Began in China. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1945. Print.
• Sze, Mai-mai. Silent Children: A Novel. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1948. Print.
• Sze, Mai-mai. The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting: With a Translation of the Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan, Or, Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679-1701. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. Print. Bollingen Series 49.
• Sze, Mai-mai. The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting: With a Translation of the Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan; Or, Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679-1701. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1957. Print.
• Sze, Mai-mai. The Way of Chinese Painting, Its Ideas and Technique: With Selections from the Seventeenth-Century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. New York: Random House, 1959. Print.
• Sze, Mai-mai. The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting: With a Translation of the Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan, Or, Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679-1701. 2nd ed. with corrections. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. Print. Bollingen Series 49.

Legacy

• The books owned by Sze and Irene Sharaff were donated to the New York Society Library in New York City after their deaths, where they remain today.^[13] The Sharaff/Sze Collection contains nearly one thousand books, including many on Chinese history, philosophy, and religion. Many of these, including sinologist Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, contain Sze's own annotations.
• Sze and Sharaff also established a trust to support various educational and research institutions, including the Needham Research Institute^[14] and Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University. At Lucy Cavendish College, a bequest from the trust funded the construction of a music and meditation pavilion, and established the Alice Tong Sze and Lu Gwei Djen Research Fellowships.^[15]

References

Citations

Further reading

• Amato, Jean. "Mai-mai Sze (1910-1992)." Asian American Autobiographers: A bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Ed. Guiyou Huang. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 2001. P. 345-349. Printed book.
• “Mai-Mai Sze, 82, A Writer Known Also as a Painter.” The New York Times 18 July 1992. NYTimes.com. Web. 6 Aug. 2014.
• Qian, Zhaoming. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Print.
• Kuhl, Nancy. Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2007.
• McGuire, William. Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print.

External links

• New York Society Library: Sharaff/Sze Collection
• Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women
• "Speech by Mai-Mai Sze at India League Mass Meeting," SAADA Digital Archive
• "Breadcrumbs in the Library," the Blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas