Donated in the spirit of peace

It was not too long after the death of his eldest son that a grief-stricken Chester Chang sought respite in the quiet courtyard of one of his favorite places, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The strangest thing happened,” begins Chang, an avid art collector, speaking at his Santa Monica home, filled to bursting with sculptures, paintings, tapestries, furniture, books, ceramics, swords and daggers from his far Eastern travels. It was a weekday, he says, students on field trips were at the museum and “one of the children was saying to his teacher: ‘We just came out of the Japanese pavilion; that’s my history!’

“I said, ‘My goodness, that’s where it starts, at that level.’

“I thought, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do.’ ”

On May 7, Chang’s son, Chester Clarence Chang of Santa Monica, a pilot with a private jet company, was shot to death outside a Koreatown nightclub during an evening out with friends. Det. Alan Solomon of the LAPD’s Asian Crime Unit says the slaying occurred after the 26-year-old -- known by his middle name, Clarence -- tried to intervene in a conflict involving members of two Asian gangs, one from the neighborhood and the other from the San Gabriel Valley. Solomon says Clarence was not a member of either gang.

Now the young man’s father is making a donation in his son’s name, one he hopes will help defuse tension among the diverse Asian communities of Los Angeles. The elder Chang, 66 -- a pilot like his son, as well as a flight instructor -- has donated a rare wooden Vietnamese Buddha to LACMA.

Chang says he hopes that the Buddha, a symbol of a common religious belief among diverse Asian cultures, will become a source of pride for Vietnamese immigrants to Los Angeles.

Solomon says the conflict involved individuals of Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese descents. But for the elder Chang, it’s irrelevant. He sees such confrontations as an indicator of the larger problem of friction among all Asian immigrant groups. To live in peace, he says, diverse communities need to feel equal in “safety, possessions and access.”

Chang, born in Korea, said he believes that expanding the museum’s Vietnamese holdings will help foster the same pride that he feels when he sees Korean artworks in LACMA’s galleries. “It’s the yin and the yang, what we have to have for a harmonious community,” he says.

The seated Buddha, 27 inches tall and believed to be from the 18th century, is coated with lacquer and a dark red pigment under the remains of a gilt surface that has flaked off to a mere hint of its original richness. The figure will be placed in the museum’s Southeast Asia gallery, probably by the end of August.

Chang offered dozens of Vietnamese objects to LACMA but the museum has accepted only one, the Buddha, because of its rarity and appropriateness within LACMA’s collection, says J. Keith Wilson, LACMA’s chief curator of Asian art. Chang says he purchased the piece from a private collector in Saigon.

Robert Brown, LACMA’s curator of Southeast Asian art and a professor of Indian and Southeast Asian art at UCLA, says the Buddha has already attracted inquiries from Vietnamese doctoral candidates interested in studying it.

About a dozen pieces donated from Chang’s Korean collection -- ceramics, Buddhist sculptures and metalwork -- are already on display at LACMA, and pieces from his collection were featured in LACMA’s popular exhibition “Transmitting Culture: Korean Ceramics From Korean American Collections,” celebrating the 100th anniversary of Korean immigration to the United States, which ran from late 2003 to early 2004.

Wilson says that Chang often casually places valuable art objects in his car and ferries them to the museum for inspection. “We try to get him not to do that,” Wilson says with mock dismay. The Buddha, however, was shipped directly from Hawaii, where it had been on loan to the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Wooden Buddhas often did not survive fire, wood-eating insects and the ravages of war. Experts estimate that fewer than 50 Vietnamese Buddhas are currently in Western museums, as compared with thousands from China and Tibet. Wilson says this is partly because China and Tibet have a longer tradition of Buddhism, but mostly because their Buddhas were fashioned from more durable materials: gilt bronze and stone. (Another wooden Vietnamese Buddha, this one from the 17th century, can be found at Pasadena’s Asia Pacific Museum.)

Brown says little is known about LACMA’s newest Buddha because art historians today are more likely to focus on Vietnamese objects from the Dong Son or Bronze Age culture, 500 BC to AD 200. The Bronze Age work, Brown says, offers clues to Vietnamese culture before Chinese and Indian influences dominated the country.

“I have to really emphasize how little scholarly work has been done on these,” Brown says. “We don’t have another piece like it.”

Over the years, Chang and his wife, Wanda, have added to an art collection that has been in his family since the second half of the 19th century -- the time of Chang’s maternal great-grandmother, Korea’s Queen Myungsung, known as Queen Min. Chang’s father, Ji-hwan Chang, brought several Korean artworks when he came to the United States by boat in 1947 to establish the first Korean consulate in Los Angeles. His family joined him in 1948.

Chester Chang spent most of his formative years in L.A. and attended Los Angeles High School. He holds a master’s degree in education from USC and a doctorate in public administration from the University of La Verne. He has held posts with the U.S. Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration, for which he still works.

The family collection contains mostly Korean pieces but also works from China, Japan and Vietnam, purchased during Chang’s long government career, which took him to Korea, Tokyo and Guam, among other locations.

As a result of Chang’s career travels, Clarence was born a U.S. citizen in Korea, and Chang’s younger son, Cameron, 24, now a medical student, was born in Japan.

Chang’s last overseas post was for the FAA in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, developing airports and air traffic systems. He also served as an advisor to the U.S. Embassy during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Since his work in Saudi Arabia, Chang has been based in Los Angeles, working for the FAA as a designated pilot examiner and teaching at various institutions, including Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Long Beach, where Clarence received his degree -- although his father had already taught him to fly (the younger Chang got his private glider certificate at 16).

Before their son’s death, Chang’s wife was already in ill health after suffering two strokes. Now, Chester Chang says, she spends much of her time in seclusion. For Chang, steeped in the military discipline that goes along with his government service, it seemed natural to channel his grief into action.

“If I could just take a moment to describe his personality to you -- this is the first time I have just reflected back that I did not really raise my son,” Chang muses, sitting beside photos of Clarence -- here laughing with colleagues from work at Prime Jet in Van Nuys, there posing inside a company plane with Paris and Nikki Hilton. “When you are overseas in an embassy, you are protected by U.S. Marines; his life revolved around Marines, they are his fathers.

“There were two things, growing up, that were embedded in his personality: One was never leave a fallen buddy behind, and the other thing was always help someone in need.”