>>> This exhibition is called Streams and
Mountains Without End: Landscape Traditions of
China and it's actually been ongoing for more than a year
and a half but this version of it is the final installation.
But we've changed all sixty paintings and so people who
have seen earlier editions of this exhibition can come again.
They'll see all new paintings.
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So the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been collecting
Chinese art for almost a hundred and fifty years.
In the first thirty or forty years most of what
the Met collected was ceramics and other
decorative arts. But then starting in 1913 the Met
started to acquire Chinese paintings. But it wasn't
until the 1970s that the Met got really serious
about Chinese paintings and attempted to acquire
masterpieces show that the majesty of this tradition
and from 1973 going forward to today there's
been a major effort to be able to really represent
the greatest of Chinese painting and calligraphy
and the key elements in that were major gifts by
donors such as Douglas Dylan, Oscar Tang,
John Crawford, and others who contributed majorly to the
effort to bolster this collection and be able to
bring to people visiting New York a sense of the
majesty of the tradition. So this is one of the most
celebrated famous paintings in the Met's collection.
It comes from the Song dynasty from the early 12th century.
The painting itself we date by style alone.
It doesn't have a signature by an artist on it but it has
all this other material around it. You can see the
writing at the top and the bottom by the famous collector
and painter Dong Qichang. And he had identified it as
a work of the Li Chong, a 10th century painter,
but we think it's probably a little bit later.
What it depicts is a scholar riding on a donkey.
He has a servant walking in front of him carrying a
bundle of scrolls and then a servant walking behind him
who is carrying a cylindrical sort of basket or storing
documents. In ancient old pine tree, it's actually
started to lean over and I mean this relates back to
a very old Chinese idea coming from a text,
that the greatest hope that a person should have is to
be like an old tree, so old that it almost looks
like it's dead but in fact the tree is still alive
and the tree still persists.
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This is a painting by Ni Zan dated 1363. This is the
Yuan dynasty, the dynasty where China was ruled by
Mongols and it's ethnically Chinese scholars didn't
have as many opportunities to serve in government,
especially toward the end of the dynasty when famine
and natural disaster and create chaos. You would
never know it by looking at this extremely
minimalist stripped down almost whisper-quiet
monochrome ink painting where the top third of the
picture is essentially untouched paper and then
the middle section is untouched paper and our
eyes have a way of knitting together the
image where we read that empty paper at the top as
sky and we see the empty paper that dominates the
middle of the composition as water.
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The painting behind me is dated 1691. It was made
for one of the grand interior spaces of the
city called Yangzhou. This is a very wealthy city in 1691.
There were patrons who needed big splashy
impressive looking paintings for their big
impressive looking homes. And the artist who ran
this workshop, Yuan Jiang, he specialized in serving
these clients. This is a depiction of a real palace.
A famous palace built in the Sui dynasty
in the 6th century and then taken over by the
Tang dynasty that followed it. Then you also get
human figures within the painting itself. Down near
the bottom here you see a group of horse riders that
are just getting ready to cross this arch stone
bridge and one of those horse riders is the
Emperor himself. I believe him to be the second
emperor of the Tang dynasty.
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This is a painting called Searching for my Parents.
It's dated 1656 and it's by an artist named Huang Xiangjian.
So he lost contact with his father and so he set out
from his house in Suzhou on foot, took him about a year,
down to Yunnan Province. He found his
parents and he brought them back to Suzhou and
the whole round trip took two years and we see at
one point a military garrison where he was
questioned really roughly by the soldiers who were there.
You even see war elephants further on
toward the end of the painting.
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This gallery is devoted exclusively to landscapes
on painted fans and some of those fans like this
one were actually made to be folded originally.
All the other fans other than this one in this room are
actually mounted as album leaves and since with
landscapes on them, including some of these
earlier fans painted on here. It's incredibly
detailed just how elegant an object this is,
just solely for the purpose of cooling yourself down on
a summer day.
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Landscape didn't just find
its way onto paintings in pre-modern China.
It was suffusing all the surfaces that you might
encounter in a kind of luxurious environment including
lacquer and bamboo carving and in this case ceramics.
So this is this enormous porcelain vase made in
Jingdezhen, the great ceramic city, in Jiangxi
Province. And you have a guy here gesturing at the
waterfall and pointing it out to his friends. And then
the eye leads us upward to towering pines and then
we got a second register of landscape and porcelain.
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This is a painting dated 1829 by an artist
Su Renshan and he was from Guangdong Province.
This is a painting by a 14 year old.
He was a prodigy. And as I said, he was self-taught.
By this point in his career he's already
starting to cycle through different types of painting.
By the time he's in his 20s his paintings
look very different than this. He's struggled with
mental illness later in his life and he actually
died somewhat young. Along the left edge of the
painting there's a single column of text and that
text is written by the artist himself, our 14 year old.
The other inscription is by, of course, his father.
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I mentioned before that this exhibition ranges all the way
from the 12th century to the 21st century and this
is a painting dated 1977 and it's by a painter named
Wu Guanzhong. This is waves at this coastal area
called Beidaihe. It's almost entirely abstract
and then at the top he dropped in a few boats.
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This painting is by Zhang Daqian, one of
the titans of Chinese modernism. He was not only
a painter, I mentioned him earlier as a collector.
He was one of the top five collectors of Chinese painting.
Some of these ink contour lines that he's dropped on
on top of the color field of azurite blue and
malachite green, you can read those as sort of fissures
in a mountain. Paintings from this period are really
treasured within the history of kind of modern
Chinese painting as a breakthrough.
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This painting from 1971 is by an artist who we know
by two names, either C C Wang as he was known in
the United States or Wang Jiqian, his Chinese name.
He was a collector and a painter and a calligrapher
who left China in the late 1940s. He brought
paintings with him at a level of quality,
they were very rare in the United States like
Dong Qichang and they were friends. And the core of
the Met's collection of early of Song and Yuan
dynasty paintings actually coming from C C Wang's
collection through purchases in the 1970s and then later
through purchases and donations by other donors principally
Oscar Tang in the 1990s and through to today.
As a painter, he's really interesting because he's
really seeking to use these materials that's to create
something modern and sometimes nearly abstract.
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