Author/Translator

小淇園印

Steven D. Owyoung is a student of Asian culture with a specialty in the history, literature, and art of China. Since retiring from the world of the art museum, he devotes his time to tea, writing and lecturing on the plant and leaf as he has for over thirty years.

Owyoung has completed a translation of the Chajing 茶經 (Book of Tea, 780 A.D.) by the tea master Lu Yu 陸羽 (circa 733-804 A.D.). The translation is fully annotated and includes an introduction, commentary, and explanations of the ten parts. Owyoung has also translated the Autobiography of Imperial Instructor Lu and completed a study of Lu Yu’s early years.

Zhuli ting 竹里亭, Pavilion in Bamboo, Minor Qi Garden

Résumé

Owyoung retired as Curator of Asian Arts at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2005. He held the Saint Louis post for twenty-two years and is presently an independent scholar and translator. He received his Master of Arts in the history of art from the University of Michigan where he continued graduate studies through doctoral candidacy in Chinese painting. A Fulbright Fellow, he did extensive research in Taiwan and Japan on Ming dynasty painting collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a museum professional, Owyoung worked in the Exhibitions Division of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, was a Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and joined the curatorial staff of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University where he was Assistant Curator of Oriental Art and taught Chinese art. In 1983, he accepted the offer to head the Department of Asian Arts at Saint Louis. He served as consultant to the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, and the academic journal Daedelus for its special issue on museums, 1999. Since 1984, he has been associated with Washington University in St. Louis and co-organizer of many University and Museum Asian programs.

Owyoung teaches and lectures extensively on a wide range of subjects in Chinese and Japanese art at universities and museums, including Oriental Ceramic Society, Hong Kong; Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies; University of London; University of Georgia; Cornell University; The Gitter-Yelen Art Study Center, New Orleans; University of Kansas; Pennsylvania State University; University of Maryland; University of California, Davis; Detroit Institute of Arts; Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City; J. Paul Getty Museum; Japan Society Gallery, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Princeton University; Washington University in Saint Louis; St. Louis University High School; St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.