The Trustees

  • Christer von der Burg graduated from Stockholm University with an MA in Art History and Chinese. After three years of work at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm he started his own business, Han Shan Tang bookshop, specialising in books on East Asia; this enterprise gave him endless opportunities to study Chinese prints and printing.
    He moved the bookshop to London in 1978 and, even today, it is still the major supplier of new, second-hand and antiquarian books on the arts and culture of China, Japan and Korea.

    In 1997,encouraged by his late friend Verena Bolinder-Müller,he established the Muban Foundation for the propagation of the knowledge of Chinese printing. He saw that Chinese prints were ignored as a research subject, as much among scholars as collectors, especially in comparison with the popularity of Japanese prints. Christer then decided to start a collection of both pre-modern and contemporary Chinese prints. Through annual visits to artists and academies in China during the years 1997-2007, a collection of over 8,000 prints was assembled, a collection now deposited with the Muban Educational Trust and which forms the backbone of its study material. He has also collected books, catalogues, and reference material on the subject, creating a valuable reference library.

    Christer retired from the book business in 2000, but has since been active in building up what is now the second largest collection of antique Chinese prints in the world, especially those of the 18th century from the city of Suzhou.

    Christer’s passionate interest in Chinese prints has actually encouraged many Chinese artists to continue the tradition of Chinese woodblock printing and he has also taught the Chinese collectors the importance and significance of Chinese prints, a fact that can be verified in the increase and value of prints in today’s Chinese auctions.

    Christer’s knowledge in the field is well respected and continually evolving. He regularly attends seminars and conventions with colleagues, collectors and academics in his field and adjacent disciplines. He has given lectures on the theme of Chinese prints and printing, writes an irregular blog, www.chiwoopri.wordpress.com, and strives to widen the exposure of this art form.

  • Frances Wood studied Chinese at Newnham College, Cambridge and Peking University and gained aPhD in Chinese Architectural History at the University of London. She worked as head of the Chinese collections at the British Library from 1977 until 2013. Her publications include Chinese Illustration (1986), The Blue Guide to China (2002), The Silk Road (2003), The Diamond Sutra (2010), Chinese Export Paintings in the British Library (2011), Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War (2016), Great Books of China: From Ancient Times to the Present (2017) and others.

  • Elizabeth is currently a full time student of the history of art, having spent four decades as an educationalist. She began her career as a history teacher and subsequently held senior positions in local education authorities and in voluntary organisations. She has been a board member of educational bodies, universities and educational institutions. Elizabeth has had a long standing interest in China since she first visited Peking in 1981. Between 2001 and 2011, she worked to encourage schools, colleges and universities to teach young people Mandarin and Chinese history and to build partnerships with their counterparts in China. She was responsible for setting up the first schools based Confucius Institute in partnership with Hanban (the Chinese International Office for Mandarin Teaching) and Peking University in 2006. This initiative has been successful in securing a sustainable increase in the number of students studying Mandarin at school. She also worked to support educational cooperation and exchange between the UK and China at national and regional levels to enable the two systems to learn from each other. In 2007 she received the Icebreaker of the Year Award from the 48 Group Club (an independent business network committed to building UK/China trade) and in 2008 she became a Fellow of the Group. She was a member of the Prime Minister’s delegation to China in November 2010. She has held a number of honorary positions with national and provincial education bodies in China and has spoken at conferences and events in China. She believes that it is important to build strong educational, cultural and trading relationships between the UK and China.

  • Rebecca graduated from St. Hugh’s College of Oxford University with a BA degree in Jurisprudence in 1998. She worked as P.A. to the Headmaster, Examination Office and Senior Tutor at Hall School Wimbledon from 1998 to 2015. She relocated to Sweden with her family in 2016 and currently works at Värmdö Skärgårds Skola, Runmarö, Sweden.

  • Weimin He (PhD, RE) is currently the artist-in-residence in the Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He is also the tutor for the Saturday morning life drawing class at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Born in northeast China, Weimin studied both Chinese and western painting in the Fine Art Department of Harbin Normal University. He then studied for a postgraduate qaulification in printmaking in The Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang. In 1999, after working eight years as a professional artist in the Heilongjiang Provincial Printmaking Institute, he received a scholarship from the Muban Foundation (now the Muban Educational Trust) which enabled him to travel to the UK to study printmaking in the University of Ulster in Belfast. He was awarded a DPhil degree in 2005 and the same year was appointed as the Christensen Research Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum where he was responsible for the acquisition of contemporary Chinese prints on behalf of the Museum, a result of which was the exhibition Chinese Prints 1950 – 2006 in the Ashmolean Museum which he co-curated with Shelagh Vainker. As a printmaker, Weimin has practiced in both woodblock printmaking and lithography, his work often depicting scenes of everyday life in town and countryside, landscapes and portraits with both the brush and the cutting knife. His style is bold and innovative, using broad and vivid strokes with sharp outlines to produce black and white imagery. Inspired by traditional Chinese seal cutting and calligraphy, he has created his individual style, portraying contemporary scenes of both Britain and China. Weimin’s works have been exhibited internationally during the last two decades, he was awarded the Lu Xun Prize by the Chinese Printmakers Association in 1999 in recognition of his achievements in printmaking. His work is represented in many public and private collections, including The British Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, The Portland (Oregon) Museum and The China National Gallery in Beijing.