![]() Tao, the central concept in Taoism, means most literally Way, as in a road or pathway. That cosmology begins with the Taoism of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (sixth century bce), the seminal work of Chinese spiritual philosophy and the book translated more often into English than any other. Instead, the paintings render a Taoist/Ch’an cosmology that feels surprisingly familiar here in the modern West. In fact, mountain landscape is only the apparent content of Chinese paintings like those on view in the Met show. Otherwise, it’s like looking at Renaissance painting with no knowledge of Christianity. Understanding these images requires some knowledge of the conceptual framework within which they operate. Even a cursory glance confirms that Chinese landscape paintings are fundamentally different from their Western equivalents-especially in the former’s abundance of empty space and lack of realistic representation. Wang Wei’s scroll reveals how landscape painting was, even in its nascent form, a manifestation of the Taoist/Ch’an principles that shaped the minds of China’s artist-intellectuals. Currently in its third phase (through January 6, 2019), the exhibition contains many kinds of objects-ceramics, tapestries and robes, scholar’s rocks, sculptures, brush holders-but painting clearly reigns supreme among them. This copy of Wang Wei’s scroll is just one of the more than 120 paintings in the splendid show “Streams and Mountains Without End: Landscape Traditions of China,” slated to fill the Chinese galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, not once but four times over the course of two years. Great painters often copied esteemed works by their predecessors as a way of fully inhabiting the minds of those earlier artists, a way of mastering their insights-and when original paintings are lost, surviving copies by later masters are frequently revered as if they were the originals. On Autumn-Pitch Mountain paths, they flauntĭarkness, woodcutters there beyond knowing. Kingfisher-greens rippling streamwater blue. Tall bamboo blaze in meandering emptiness: No one knows clouds beneath these raftersĭrifting off to bring that human realm rain. In the portion illustrated here, the four titles (one slightly hidden above the bamboo and below the ridgeline) refer to the following poems-beginning, in traditional fashion, on the right and moving left:įragrant reeds braided into thatched eaves: One section of the long scroll includes, just above the landscape elements, the titles of poems corresponding to the twenty sites. He was also one of China’s most famous poets, known especially for a series of twenty poems titled “Wheel-Rim River Sequence.” Each poem in the series is about a specific place in the mountain landscape around his home, and Wang painted a companion scroll depicting the same twenty sites.Ī wonderful centuries-later “copy” of the painting preserves the simple style of Wang working at the beginning of the landscape tradition. Like virtually all artist-intellectuals in ancient China after 400, Wang Wei was a very serious student of Ch’an Buddhism. Landscape painting itself arose three centuries later in the work of Wang Wei. ![]() To explain it, I forget words altogether. Far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
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