Center for East Asian Garden Studies

The Huntington’s Center for East Asian Garden Studies (CEAGS) promotes innovative scholarship on the traditions of garden-making in China, Japan, and Korea. The center seeks to make these traditions accessible to diverse audiences through publications, lectures, workshops, symposia, and exhibitions.

Research Fellowship

The June and Simon K.C. Li Fellowship in East Asian Garden and Landscape Studies supports research in East Asian garden and landscape studies by scholars at any stage of career. Visit Available Fellowships to learn more.

Resources

The Center for East Asian Garden Studies was founded to fulfill the educational potential of The Huntington’s Chinese and Japanese Gardens. The gardens themselves offer significant botanical and historical resources to researchers and to the public. The Chinese Garden, for example, preserves a collection of nearly 200 medicinal plants, many of which are rare outside of China; the Japanese Garden, meanwhile, is home to landscapes that document 100 years of American responses to Japanese aesthetics.

CEAGS maintains a scholarly reference library of approximately 8000 volumes, drawn primarily from the collections of Wan-go H.C. Weng and Ju-hsi Chou. It has particular strengths in Chinese garden, painting, and literary history, as well as Japanese garden history. CEAGS also oversees a small collection of Japanese rare books on stone appreciation, bonsai, and the sencha tea ceremony established by the American Viewing Stone Resource Center (AVSRC). The collections are housed in the Brody Botanical Center.

CEAGS staff work with the Huntington Art Museum to exhibit and expand the institution’s collection of East Asian garden-related artworks. Highlights include a remarkable hanging scroll by Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–ca. 1552) and a rare early printing of the Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting (ca. 1633–1703).

Publications

Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China (2024)

edited by Phillip E. Bloom, Nicholas K. Menzies, and Michelle Bailey

The Huntington’s Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China exhibition asks: What is a garden, and what can you do with one? This exhibition catalog focuses on the gardens of China’s literati during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912), exploring gardens as spaces for growing and contemplating plants to better understand the world and humans’ place in it. 212 pages; 112 color illustrations.

Access the Free e-Book

Gardens, Art, and Commerce in Chinese Woodblock Prints (2016)

edited by T. June Li and Suzanne E. Wright

This exhibition catalogue explores the art, craft, and cultural significance of Chinese woodblock prints made during their golden age, from the late 16th through the 19th century. Bringing together 48 of the best examples gathered from the National Library of China, Beijing; the Nanjing Library; the Shanghai Museum; and institutional and private collections in the United States, it features delicate works with painterly textures and subtle colors depicting plants, birds, and other garden elements alongside monumental accounts of sprawling, architecturally elaborate scholar’s gardens.

One Hundred Years in The Huntington's Japanese Garden: Harmony with Nature (2012)

edited by T. June Li

For more than one hundred years, the Japanese Garden at The Huntington has served as a bellwether for the West’s engagement with Asian culture. This lavishly illustrated volume explores the garden’s history, from its development for the Huntington estate as a display of fashionable, cultivated taste, to its quiet deterioration and neglect during World War II, to its resurgence in the 1950s as a showcase for Japanese culture and garden arts, and ultimately to its renovation and expansion during its centennial in 2012.

Another World Lies Beyond: Creating Liu Fang Yuan, The Huntington's Chinese Garden (2008)

edited by T. June Li

This beautifully produced book tells the story and pictorially reveals one of the largest formal Chinese gardens in the world outside of China. The contributors to Another World Lies Beyond discuss the challenges of constructing the garden in Southern California, as well as the cultural traditions and aesthetics of Chinese garden design, especially the ways in which the plants and structures engage the imagination of visitors.

Center for East Asian Garden Studies

Research Fellowship

Resources

Exhibitions

the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington

Wang Mansheng: Without Us

奪天工 Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China

Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China

Crafting a Garden: Inside the Creation of Liu Fang Yuan

A Garden of Words: The Calligraphy of Liu Fang Yuan

Events

Recorded Programs

2024–25