>>> NARRATOR: What do traditional Chinese Artists love
so much about landscape paintings?
Are there secret meanings behind these painting of
mountains and rivers?
September 13, 2017, the New York Times published
an article “If Those Mountains Could Talk”;
featuring the Chinese Landscape exhibition at Metropolitan
Museum, called “Streams and Mountains Without End”.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: One of the things that visitors
who are more familiar with other parts of the museum will
recognize when they come to our galleries immediately is
that the formats of the painting are a little different
from what you would see in the European painting
galleries and the materials are different.
So to start with the main formats of Chinese painting
that you'll see in this show, hand scroll format where
you have a scroll that reads from right to left.
Kind of cinematic in that it flows over time.
We also have hanging scrolls that hang on walls.
Fans that people would paint on and albums.
Those are the main formats and generally the paintings are
on either paper, what is sometimes called rice paper
in English, a very absorbent paper and then silk.
>>> NARRATOR: This exhibition, which showcases more than
120 Chinese landscape paintings in three rotations,
offers some insights into this thousand year old
Chinese tradition.
Each rotation will last 5-6 months, and the show
will run from August 26, 2017 to January 6, 2019.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: Generally the materials are
light sensitive and so that's part of why we do all these
rotating exhibitions in these galleries is because we'll put
works on view for a little while, few months or so,
and then we'll take them off.
So we're in the first gallery of the exhibition now.
This is the gallery that's named after the exhibition itself.
It's called Streams and Mountains Without End and
I'm standing in front of the painting that sort of
stimulated this exhibition in my mind.
This is a long landscape hand scroll from around
the turn of the 15th century.
It's a Ming Dynasty painting.
Actually looking at it, unrolling it piece by piece for
the viewer, him or herself is a kind of a journey and so
you begin in this little mountain hamlet here.
You can see that the season is spring time.
They're a little figures in here that we can follow
throughout the landscape and sort of travel with them.
Here we have two guys crossing a bridge.
Here a turbulent patch of water with a boat that's
being pulled back into shore, and as you move
through the landscape something really
interesting happens the seasons actually change
from what appears to be spring in the beginning
through a kind of summary, missed suffused summer
scene into autumn and then finally at the end of the
scroll you conclude with a snow scene, winter.
We’re in the second gallery now.
This is the gallery called the Landscape of Poetry
and all the paintings in this gallery were made in
some kind of response to poetry.
This painting is particularly fun.
And here we see a guy sitting here at the
water's edge and then up here we see a bank of
clouds rising from this marshy floodplain and so
you know over time people have come to think that
this is this one-way way poem that says, “I walked
to the place where the water ends and I sit and
watch at the time when the clouds rise.”
>>> NARRATOR: As early as 1000 years ago,
Chinese artists want their paintings to be poetry,
not merely a copy of the real scene.
Calligraphy writings are often a part of the Chinese painting;
some are poems to describe the painted scene,
others are the painting’s titles, artist’s signature
and date; or other notation about that painting.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: I'm standing in front of,
in some ways one of the most exciting art works in the
exhibition because this is from a private collection and it's
a very old very important early treasure of what we call the
Literati painting movement.
This is a painting made sort of by scholars for
scholars and this is the kind of painting that's
really trying to operate like poetry.
It's not telling you everything. It's just suggesting
around the edges and your job as a knowledgeable
viewer is to sort of finish the sentence.
>>> NARRATOR: The gallery three is Landscape of Magic.
To an educated Chinese viewer, when they see the
blue green landscapes, they will think of two
things; one is of the distant past, antiquity,
and the other is magic.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: Blue green pallet,
when it's used for landscapes, it was kind of another
sort of symbolic code in Chinese landscape painting where
the painter is signaling to you that the world depicted within
is very much a kind of magical landscape.
This is not a place that you could just walk out
your front door and hop on a horse and go visit.
This is a place that you would need to go through
some kind of magical portal to get to.
These are actually the kind of stones, the kind of minerals
that would be used to create the pigments that would
be used in these vibrant paintings so for instance you
have malachite the green on the right.
This is a lapis lazuli. That was sometimes used.
Azurite another blue mineral.
>>> NARRATOR: The forth gallery is called
Landscape of Reclusion.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: We're standing in the fourth
gallery here and this is called the Landscape of Reclusion and
here I'm dealing with this idea that's very prevalent in
Chinese art, Chinese literature, Chinese
intellectual philosophy this idea that when things
are going haywire in society it is a totally acceptable
solution to turn your back on society and to retreat
into the mountains. To just communing either with
nature or literature, poetry.
These are two renderings of one particular guy’s
kind of retirement villa, the place that he went to
get away from it all.
>>> NARRATOR: For casual viewers, the small shed
and tiny human figures can be easily missed compared
to the majesty of nature.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: This is the sixth gallery in
the exhibition. This is called the Art Historical Landscape
and does a kind of self-consciousness that
the tradition achieved very early.
Here we mostly have paintings from the 17th century.
This is the time of this really important artist Dong Qichang.
Throughout his entire life was constantly thinking
about the old, the great old landscape painting
masters who came before him.
Here we have an album from 1630, one of his really important late
works and then each leaf sort of taking on some old master
or another but through his very subjective interpretive lens.
This is the seventh gallery.
This is called the Landscape of the Garden.
The process of making a garden is the kind of act
of creation very similar to landscape painting.
You get to arrange the landscape according to
your own imagination, to your own sense.
Here we see a little thatched hut in the midst
of this kind of created curated landscape.
You can see all these fantastic rocks and he's actually playing
the guqin for that crane, because cranes will dance if you
play music for them. This is a real thing,
and so he's sitting there playing music for his crane.
That's a way of engaging with this kind of
auspicious creature and with nature generally.
>>> NARRATOR: The ninth gallery is the last,
called Riverscapes.
>>> JOSEPH SCHEIER-DOLBERG: And here I was inspired to put
this gallery together because I was just thinking to myself,
so many of the landscape paintings that we encounter in
these galleries, a lot of times they're mostly water.
This is a big piece of state art.
This was created for the emperor, probably the Kang
Xi emperor in the 1680’s, in the early Qing Dynasty,
and it's a document of this powerful river that runs
through China, the Yellow River. They were documented
here in the super deluxe court visual language.
Very different from a lot of the Literati paintings
we're seeing in this exhibition.
Another work of art in this room called the
Riverscape and this is actually another piece of
court art coming again from the Qing Dynasty Court.
This emperor that we see pictured here, the Qian
Long Emperor, who ruled for the last three quarters
of the 18th century. He went down to the south,
the sort of heartland of China to do what was called the
southern inspection tour, and so here we see him inspecting
the confluence of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River.
This an important confluence of two rivers that had some
effect on whether it was going to flood in this very
important agricultural regions, and it looks like he's about
nine feet tall. He actually wasn't taller than everybody
else. It’s just that because of his status as the emperor.
This is one of twelve scrolls of this size.
They're all the same height, so very impressive size.
>>> NARRATOR: Why Chinese so keen on mountain-river
landscapes? The viewer can draw many different answers.
One of them perhaps is that it reflects Daoism philosophy.
Traditional landscapes usually has majestic mountains and
huge rivers with tiny human figures. This contrast
reflects the Chinese Daoism view of the world.
Humans are small and mortal, must live in harmony
with nature; only mountains and rivers last for eternity.