good afternoon uh-huh I love that uh-huh I'm bill Griswold director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and it is my immense pleasure to welcome all of you to this the museum's first annual distinguished lecture on Chinese art that we should inaugurate this new tradition this year seems very timely after all we've just celebrated our Centennial as I believe all of you know and with it our first hundred years of collecting and during that period this museum has assembled what I think unquestionably is one of the world's finest holdings of Chinese art few institutions either here or in China have comparably significant holdings of Chinese paintings and sculpture or of objects in bronze and lacquer and ceramic it is therefore especially exciting that as we embark on our second century we should have the opportunity thanks to munificent donors whom I will introduce in just a moment to start bringing distinguished lectures from all over the world to this city to share with our audiences their contributions to the study of Chinese art it is timely also because we have a new curator Clarissa Ponce Bay who last year joins the museum as curator of Chinese art and chair of our extraordinarily strong department of Asian art dr. von Spee is a native of Germany and she was most recently curator of the Chinese and Central Asian collections at the British Museum in London her numerous exhibitions and publications have explored range of topics including paintings and prints and ceramics as well as contemporary Chinese art she brings over a decade of curatorial experience and accumulated expertise to the museum and we are absolutely thrilled that she is here it is also very felicitous that our first speaker should be Maxwell Hearn head of the department of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who by coincidence is also an old friend of mine and of Clarissa's but none of this would be possible were it not for our donors Pauline and Joseph Dagon Felder today's lecture gives me a welcome chance publicly to acknowledge the generosity they have had in establishing the Pauline and Joseph Dagon Felder family endowment for lectures on Chinese art they are here this afternoon with several members of their family Eric Dagon Felder Chris and Alexis sagen Felder and their son Matthew who come from afar for this special occasion we could not be more grateful and I hope the members of the digging digging Felder family will not mind if I ask them to stand so that we may acknowledge our guys it is now my privilege to bring to the podium dr. Clarissa bond Shmi curator of Chinese art and chair of Asian art here in Cleveland to introduce today's speaker Clarissa good afternoon thank you all for coming it is I'm delighted to introduce to you the speaker of our first annual distinguished lecture in Chinese art dr. Maxwell Hearn my current is douglas Dillon chairman of the department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art it's Prince he received his undergrad degree in art history at Yale and his PhD from Princeton at Princeton Lee had the privilege to study with one of the great and perhaps most influential are Chinese art historians and Chinese painting experts professor one phone Mike began working at the Metropolitan in 1971 this was a time when the museum expanded substantially it's Chinese art collection and it's gallery spaces additions included the after Chinese garden court and galleries for Chinese paintings and calligraphy Mike has worked on over 50 exhibitions and he authored and contributed to numerous catalogues I cannot name them all here I will mention only a few splendors of Imperial China treasures from the National Museum in Taipei this was a catalogue accompanying a very important exhibition that brought Imperial treasures from the National Museum Palace Museum in Taipei for the first time on a grand scale to the United States his most recent exhibitions includes the Contemporary Art Show Inc art past as present in contemporary China in 2013 and Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015 in celebration of the Asian art departments centennial my current book how to read Chinese fainting published in 2008 is also the title of today's lecture it's not only red and popular in the West it is also a best-seller in China and it's Chinese translations I think goes now into its third edition mic is not only a brilliant writer and curator he is also a great teacher he taught and lectured at Yale Princeton Columbia and NYU and in recognition of all these accomplishments microwaves elected a fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and without further ado let's work on my turn and hear about how to read Chinese paintings clarissa thank you for that overly generous introduction it's a great honor to be in Cleveland it's a special honor to have the director of the museum come to one's lecture that doesn't happen very often in New York and it's I think a wonderful timing that the Department of Asian art at the Met is celebrating its 100th anniversary just two years ago in Cleveland passed that landmark milestone in 2016 so in many ways the two institutions have been on a parallel track to bring Asian art to the west and it's extraordinary to think that I actually started my career by calling on Sherman Lee in 1971 when I was just beginning my own work at the Met I turned to Sherman Lee who had written my textbook in college I called on him and Larry sickman at the Nelson gallery to learn from the Masters and Sherman Lee said something really important to me I was on my way to Europe and I said I'm going to go visit collections of Asian art and he frowned he said there are a lot of other collections in Europe as well don't just look at asian art look at all the museum's you can you can learn something from each of them and of course Sherman Lee was extraordinary over the course of some 31 years that first curator and then director here I think it's very much to his credit and to the directors and curators who have followed in his footsteps most recently Bill Griswold and my colleagues in the Asian art department headed by clarissa von Spee but also Sonya Reeve for Indian and Southeast Asian Art Sinead dilbar and Japanese art and so on mccormick for Korean art that's a real commitment to have for curators of Asian art that shows you the significance of Asian art I think in this Institute and the galleries look splendid I think what I admire most about Cleveland is the level of quality that you sent in every piece on display so there is a uniformity of very high level works of art here that is really inspiring to everyone who comes here and everyone in the field it's also my great honor to be the first distinguished lecturer in Chinese art my thanks to Pauline and Joe dagan Felder and their family for making this possible it's a great honor to launch this a very important opportunity to really share Asian art with the Cleveland community and so delighted to be part of that so I thought for starters in terms of how to read Chinese painting we should start with how to read Chinese calligraphy and I thought I would make it easy because I picked a piece that you can all read Matthew I might call on you to read this because if you look very carefully this is an r/a i-n rain drain Matthew what's that one go away come again another day little Johnny wants to play so this is by the contemporary artist Xu Bing and Xu Bing did something remarkably creative he said everybody in the West has a hard time with calligraphy because they said I can't read it so he created an English version of calligraphy by taking the alphabet and turning it into individual components so that when you look at how he looks well all right so here's the a for example B looks like a Chinese component C so here's the the a right the see can we find a B I'm not sure there's a B here so he transformed English into a Chinese style of writing by making each of the alphabet into a component of a Chinese character but the key here is that in English all of these letters are able to be put together so that the phonetic we can actually speak the language by reading it we can see the letters it's not true with Chinese Chinese characters there is a phonetic clue oftentimes but you really have to memorize the characters and this is how people learn calligraphy they start by actually tracing the characters with a supple tip brush and he's obviously looking at the book while tracing so every Chinese student starts by learning how to use a brush to write historically at least now we all use computers handwriting has gone to hell in a handbasket I don't have to tell you that it's not just doctors these days so so this way of writing but thousands of years this was a way in which people were able to use the same tool to both write and paint and so calligraphy became the basis for painting as well as writing and calligraphy means beautiful writing and this is an example of beautiful writing because this character which is the word for writing or book or calligraphy should look at how extraordinary the lines are you can follow the brush as it enters but this is just barely the tip then you pressed down to widen it lifting up slightly so it's narrower and then ending with a flourish like this and then repeating that rhythm over and over again and then and there's a distinct stroke order so we can actually follow the way in which a character is written now this character is right here it's the size of your fingernail in the original manuscript this is only about 8 or 9 inches tall so look at the amount of hair in constructing an individual character that's that small it gives you a sense of the brush control that is at the heart of Chinese painting as well as calligraphy so we start with calligraphy we understand the meaning of how to modulate lines how to compose a character so that it holds together there's this dynamic equilibrium between these long horizontals weighted down with strong verticals so the composition of every character becomes like a painting so painting and calligraphy are the sister arts in China now gets a little more complicated the character I just showed you is what we call standard script that is closest to the printed language so it is highly legible but just as in English where your ABCs you can write them in longhand or in cursive writing and it becomes far less easy to read your doctor's messages this is written by a man named Hong Tianjin in the year about 1090 ad honking Jin was a loyal official in the song court and he'd been banished because of a disagreement between different parties sound familiar so he transcribed this text this is the end of a sixty two foot long scroll transcribing a text that was written in about a hundred and forty BC by soo much in and it describes the contest the battle between the Prime Minister and a general about how to confront the rising power of the qin state and if you come to New York before July 16th you'll be able to see a wonderful exhibition called Age of Empires the Qin and Han dynasties Chinese art the Qin was the first Empire to unify all of China happened in 221 BC before that they were very aggressive State and this text is about the Qin state trying to intimidate a neighboring state the state of gel and this contest between two of the elite members of Java society really hinged on how to deal with that political threat and the man who wrote who's being quoted here was the Prime Minister and he realized that if he and the general got into a struggle it could only weaken the state now here's a man wanting gin the writer the track the calligrapher who has just been banished so there's a message here and his message we can read this so this is jugando t-shirt food du Chun would soy wait Suja Shen hua Zhu Zhi hope so totally yeah so he says when Tigers look at the wonderful tail of that tiger when they come into conflict because of their strength it cannot both survive because of this I have put first the country's well-being and I put aside personal disputes so instead of getting very personal and getting his nose out of joint about being insulted by the general making it into a personality contest he said I'm going to set that aside in for the good of the country and he ends with this powerful final character yet so starting with Tiger and ending with yeah there's this sense of the emotion that he's embedding in the writing so this is very hard to convey emotion it certainly conveys a sense of elegance but with this writing you have the man's personality the man's feelings are also part of the message so this is an incredibly important part of calligraphy and that's also something that's embedded in the art of painting we can sometimes sense an emotional intensity behind the pictorial imagery just as behind the words we have a sense of this man stealing so calligraphy believe it or not even though it's written on a flat surface has almost a three-dimensional power to it look at how these lines wrap around each other the dynamism of this so this is the enlarged character for beat the Jade disk that the state of Zhao and the state of Qin were contesting Qin was trying to extort that this Jade precious Jade disk there's one on view and the galleries upstairs from job so the writer is simplifying this character but he's turning it into this wonderful dynamic almost three-dimensional sculpture and I used that principle to help people make the leap between abstract design and writing so I put the scroll from 1090 here I put from 1999 a work by wound only next to it I was actually interviewed by a Chinese journalist who saw all these Westerners standing in front of this scroll they said how can Westerners appreciate that they can't read it I said okay tell me about this one he couldn't read that because it's not a word it's just abstraction but I said Westerners know about figure-ground relationships they know about gestural art they know about dynamism in abstraction if a westerner can appreciate this surely they can appreciate that point well-taken so that's an important thing for you all to remember when you look at Chinese painting maybe you say I don't understand all of the metaphors going on I don't understand the writing but there's something there that you can respond to on a visceral level so this combination this challenge I think it really brings it home for me that this has an abstract dynamism that we can really sense and we know exactly how the writer formed this so you can you can vividly recreate the act of creation how many times can you do that with the work of art in every piece of calligraphy that's possible and to make the point even more vivid look at the aesthetic the Chinese developed in appreciating natural rocks they went after these extraordinarily dynamic forms that look a lot like calligraphy so this is a tiny scholars rock maybe it goes back several hundred years even the wooden stand is beautifully articulated now it might have been helped a little bit by a sculptor but the sculptor didn't acknowledge that he wanted to make us believe that this was entirely done by Nature and ultimately calligraphy is meant to have the same effect that it looks so natural it looks so vivid that the person who wrote it was must have been like a God he was actually creating something new just like the natural world so now we can turn to painting and this is a work of art from around the year 750 ad attributed to the great master of horse painting Khan Gunn and it's a tremendously rare survivor it's a little piece of paper it's about 10 inches by 12 inches very small I love the Cleveland Museum projection this is this is better than a drive-in theater right it's terrific so so this is a very small intimate work of art you're meant to get close to it so you really appreciate it and that also explains why it's okay to write on the painting this is the chin long emperor in the 18th century this is a ruler from about 970 dong en un gets in the act in the 9th century me foo and all these seals so we have about a thousand years of the history of transmission of this work of art right on the painting itself that's an enhancement from the point of view of the Chinese and so we have it's a wonderful affirmation here it says the southern song cipher here when it appears it's mostly on genuine works and this is signed by yes so he's a 13th century 12 13th century connoisseur so he's saying when you see John the Lee Hojo's the writing on a painting it must mean it's authentic so we're getting back to the 750 s in terms of just looking at the transmission of the work of art itself so that's a very important part of connoisseurship but never mind all that let's look at the painting so remember in calligraphy you have this balance between making something look naturalistic and something that has this abstract force that carries the vigor the energy of the writer himself so part of hungins challenge is to make us feel the energy of this horse but he's also trying to create an icon horse as a concept so he had a little help there's a long history of imaging horses in China this is a rubbing from the Han Dynasty so about 2,000 years ago and you can see the horse is in silhouette he's completely so shown from the side he couldn't possibly stand on these two hooves right you would fall over not really naturalistic but look at the energy the ears are pointed forward his mouth is open looks sort of in Juris in fact the hoof raised up like this the tail everything about this horse says this is an animal infused with energy now Eadweard Muybridge actually took de god looking at these photographs to understand how horses actually move well hang on had it figured out about a thousand years earlier so Hagen is famous for having studied not the paintings of horses in the empiric election but going to the Imperial stable and painting from life but as we know he's not just painting from life he is trying to capture that essence of being a horse the wild energy of an imperial stallion at the same time that he's trying to convey a naturalistic image so it's a very discreetly painted in monochrome that calligraphic line look at the energy of the mane that wonderful spiral of the hairs around its nostril the tongue that rolling I was a little bit of red in it his beautiful little eyelashes could have been an ad for mascara so here is this extraordinary animal I mean he's not really being restrained by this little bit of bridle here so did Hong Kong succeed in conveying horse I think so it's really we go back and see all right he's being restrained by this powerful column here but everything about him is in movement so movement the same movement that you see in calligraphy is coming across in this horse painting that is both an animation of horses and a portrait of a particular horse called Knight shining white so it's a portrait now 750 we jump to around the Year 1300 this is jong-kul Salman who lived in a time of turmoil in China because during his lifetime the Song Dynasty was conquered by the Mongols and Ja was actually recruited by Kublai Khan serve in the government in Beijing so he went north from his native land south of Lake Thai and the Jiang nan region below the Yangtze River and served under koo Blythe and he retired in 1295 because political situation for Chinese in the government run by the Mongols was pretty difficult so he returned to his native town but he painted this image of a horse and groom what's going on here so horses obviously were appealing to the Mongols they rode horses for a living right they were the quintessential Horsemen of the steps but the Chinese also had a tradition of judging horses and a person who was a good jour judge of horseflesh was thought to be a good judge of human character so here Jon mom foo is saying I'm standing here next to this horse I know how to judge horses I know how to judge people I'm the kind of person you want to hire for your government so possibly this was dedicated to someone in the year 1296 actually as an appeal to recognize his talent he just come after all from serving under the Khan himself so it's a very important painting but he's also doing something really remarkable from the point of view of painting history he's remembering Hangang it's painting a white stallion with black mane he knew this painting he knew the reputation of hangang so he's making a reference to the past this was something he was both recognising the importance of horsemanship among the Mongols but who say hey we were there in the Tang Dynasty before you guys had culture we knew how to ride horses we were the top dog in Asia so it's a very politically astute comment and he's also done something really creative handguns force is still basically a flat profile image look at what John Fu's done he's turned the horse slightly he's foreshortened it to create this almost geometric hindquarters you can almost take a compass and make a circle here it's quite a remarkable level of abstraction so he's playing with both hey I can make the horse recede in space and I can make it more abstract calligraphy becomes important as part of his tool chest so we looked at the two horses this one is full of energy this one is calm controlled all that energy is held inside just like the groom we get the groom up there whoops yeah so he's standing there very very controlled like his horse but if you look carefully at the beautiful lines the energy of the ink here the sharp repeated lines of the mane everything about it is a combination of naturalism and abstraction so there's a certain circularity to the way in which even the frontal face of the room is depicted now Cleveland actually has a painting by Renoir exactly the same time so we see that it wasn't just jang-ho who was influenced by Tom painting this man ran Renoir actually said in one of his writings that he learned from hangang so the difference is he's chosen to paint on silk instead of paper paper is the ultimate surface for calligraphic art silk holds color better so render if I was doing a little more decorative treatment and you can see that the frontal face the relationship between horse and master is very similar but he's become quite excited about showing off his is flair for doing these decorative flourishes for the robe and the horse is a little bit wonky right he's got his facing us a little bit so he's trying to do the three sort of the three-dimensional receiving but not quite succeeding the same way but clearly there's a something in the water right now referencing the Tong dynasty is what these officials did and Ren Ren fall with a high official so we see that during the same period there's distinctions in the way painting is done but clearly there was an overriding theme landscape one of the other great traditions in Chinese art growing up again in the Tong dynasty and coming to full flourishing fruition in the early Song Dynasty so the 10th and 11th centuries so this is a painting dated to around 10:25 it's by an artist named shooting that's attributed only we don't have a signature here but we do have Emperor free songs seals that's why the yellow border is still here down here and up here we find seals from the Emperor's who is on the throne about the Year 1100 so we know this painting is earlier than 1100 so this gives you a sense of how landscape envisioned an idealized world so if figure painting is showing us this both realism and idealism landscape is doing exactly the same thing by the 11th century so we see this extraordinary central peak surrounded by these other mountains and a scroll is usually unrolled from right to left so we encounter this painting in sections we don't really see it this way so let me do that with you you start on the right hand side and we get right away some clues as to what time of year and what time of day we're in the fishing boats of all returned they've struck their sails mist is rising can you see the V of ease here they're returning to the lake for the evening figures are starting to move away from the boats and the foliage is dense mist rising up off the foliage it's a summer evening so this painting is called summer mountains as we move through the landscape there are these tiny figures that we identify with we can actually follow the path that they rode the gentleman on his donkey and his serpent carrying probably a zipper walking towards a rest house through the forest beautiful mist beautiful marshlands down below up above we have this towering monolith of the central peak and at its base there's a complex of temples with these extraordinary clouds rising up if you look at some of the Han Dynasty cloud designs in textiles and paintings of the period that cloud looks almost like a magic mushroom it has an auspicious appearance to it they talked about clouds as being this alexia so clearly there's magical clouds surrounding this temple pause further along and there's a couple more travelers there's a fisherman down here so we are in the midst of the natural world we're seeing the dwellers of the landscape and where does it lead it leads to this extraordinary temple complex so we have a vast temple here and down below let's see if we have a detail there's a couple of gentlemen looking out of the porch here so it's sort of like visiting the Catskills for the summer you go there Buddhist temple you get vegetarian food you cleanse your system right it's a very health conscious society so even if you're stuck in the capital you look at this painting it takes you in your mind to that world and here's the end of the painting you come along and right here there's something very interesting there's a pathway with a gate up here and travelers coming down from that mountain back towards the temple and right here there is a fellow with a carrying pole and he's coming back into the painting so the painting causes us to turn around we've gone too far turn back turn back doesn't set what your computers tells you in the car so we are returning to this landscape now you have a sense of the scale of this mountain because of the small figures here the temple so this becomes a model of society this was painted for the ruler the Emperor so the mountain in Song Dynasty writings is like the Emperor presiding over the landscape with the lesser mountains the trees the entire universe is ordered below the beneficent influence of the ruler so this landscape summer full flowering of nature is a flattering image of a well ruled Empire that's what the image would have been read and understood to be now in Cleveland you have this wonderful painting by Geron so into the 10th century there is that same look at this whoops sorry frontal mountain just like a frontal portrait dominating the landscape so this may have been a part of a multi panel screen originally but clearly this is the climax of the natural world so we see that the presence of the landscape and the interpretational landscape is consistent across different periods of the Song Dynasty now within about 50 years of that summer landscape it's become autumn and it's become something else as well it's become a very personal image of landscape as a reflection of human emotions this is by Guo Shi one of the great masters in the court of the Northern Soul painting around the Year 1100 maybe a little earlier 11th that's a 1080 so incredibly early we're talking about Bayeux Tapestry period here so again it's a hand scroll so we would read it from right to left you notice the big seal here many of these seals belong to the channel remember of the 18th century he had a knack of putting his heels in the most conspicuous most inappropriate places mimimi he say look at me I own this well he was a man too so he wanted to own Chinese culture but he put it right next to this seal which is again Emperor Wade's own seal from around the Year 1100 so we know this painting was in its appropriate zones collection not long after it was painted so let's walk through the painting together we start on the right hand side and what do we see first we see a couple of fishermen for fishermen live in harmony with nature they live close to the natural world their livelihood depends on it we see a couple of trees a couple of birds they're flying back towards a couple of travelers and the travelers are moving towards these distant mountains veiled and mist and the trees are leafless so it's an autumnal landscape it's a time of travel and these travelers are moving to the distant mountains in China distant mountains are often associated with another realm mountains are also where people are buried so these men are moving in time and space towards a different realm now the second half of the painting we are led on this diagonal to these two figures who are moving towards a pavilion the pavilion we see somebody setting up some tables there there's a couple more servants bringing boxes of food what's going on so this is called a wool eating a five mile Pavilion in the Song Dynasty you were reassigned to different posts every three or four years and so it became the custom to escort your friend as he was being posted to a different place in the provinces the first five leagues of there and to have a last meal together in that pavilion which was set up on the road expressly for that purpose so that seems to be what's happening here now look at the two men who are making their way to the pavilion one of them is carrying a staff he's looking back solicitously as this man bent over he's being helped by a young boy these are no spring chickens these are elderly gentlemen we think that guoshi painted this for a friend the friend was retiring after a service long service in the capital he was going back home was going back to die and guoshi himself was about 80 at the time so he was also quite elderly so this solicitous looking at a friend this is the beginning of a form of painting that lives on in China till today called some be a tool which means ascending off of farewell painting created to say goodbye to your friend now look at the dominant figures in this landscape they're not those two men there's these two trees gnarled ancient leafless and connected at the root is that an emblem of friendship between two elderly statesmen who are saying we are bonded together even though we are going to be separated perhaps forever but this becomes this extraordinary image of an autumnal seeing the end of life the end of a cycle the farewell between these two men and the artist is drawing our attention to those figures that going here but the rocks and the landscape will survive and embedded in the landscape is this emblem of friendship that will also survive powerful stuff now our friend Jumonville who painted the horse and groom jomfru also painted landscapes and this is one we happen to know that he knew this painting because a caliph on by tahmnong foo is appended a caliph on is an inscription added on the paper after the scroll itself so we know that John Moe who saw washi indeed the painting above is undoubtedly inspired by this painting there the two trees is the fishing boat there's the distant mountains what's missing are the two friends and the pavilion it's become a little more abstract just the way John Fu's horse became a little more abstract than Hangang horse for a reason Salman Phu is the one who really said that painting and calligraphy are the same thing so he actually tells us right away by putting a signature here this is the song seeds or fountain pinguin so he said i'm playfully making two trees and a level distance the guoshi painting is called old trees level distance so look at the trees and the rocks for example is that about calligraphy you bet look at these calligraphic marks look at the wonderful sharpness of his twigs how about the trees that centered tip brush for the outlined the sharp calligraphic flourishes of the pine needles so he's transforming nature into calligraphy and if calligraphy is an autobiographical record of the movement of the hand he's just made himself into pine trees and rocks he's done something else as well he's added this very long inscription at the end now it's exactly at this moment that the Chinese artist conquered the illusion of recession in space so we have the sense of a continuous plane going past the women to the distant mountains so what is Jang foo do he writes right on top of the landscape absolutely destroying the illusion by saying this is about something else so this is a very autobiographical statement we won't meet at all but he says since I was small and studying calligraphy recognized the character for calligraphy he said in my free time I would play around and I would do things but I was really not very good with landscape to Boone uncle not very good at it and then he explains why well I never saw any of these old masterpieces it was really saying that the old paintings don't survive very easy and then he said but and I don't mean to compare myself to the old masters but when I look at works by my contemporaries I have to say mine are a little different that's a boastful statement you bet they're different he is making it a new statement that calligraphy and painting of the same thing and he's writing that directly onto the painting himself quite a bold statement now his friend Young's I saw this painting and after the painting is a lot of paper he wrote on that paper he had a poem that he had so this is Pinto you soo Jeong Leo Xiang sans way Lolo uh jungeum who won only one I thought for long I can none thumb jump and he goes on to talk about his little more personal so the poem describes the scene he says there's this little leaf of a boat it's struggling to get upstream and mountain trees are shaking with this with the tremors of the of the weather and suddenly the wind and the rain evening they become more and more intense in the waves crash up until the heat hit the heaven so it's hard for the boat to row forward you see that here not a bit looks completely Placid I don't see any wind at all but the political situation with the Mongols in power was very unsettling so the poem is talking about John Wong who struggles to manage his boat in the face of the stormy weather of the Paulo politics of the day the painting it's all about this Placid world so he's holding himself in just the way that that groom was holding himself in and it was painted for a friend so you think maybe the two pine trees are the two friends and their pine trees now they're not leafless trees the pine stay green through the winter it's an image of survival he will survive and he did this is in Cleveland this is Lord Oh child this is Lodz art on who lived in the south and lived through the Mongol conquest as well a too gentle whoops two gentlemen a couple of trees including a pine tree suddenly we read this painting it's not just the landscape anymore this is an image of endurance through the wintery weather of the mongrel occupation so suddenly all of the paintings that we look at in our collections have this subtext that we can begin to read how about this one this is by changer and he was a neighbor of Jumonville they lived in the same city whooshing and he was a little bit older than Jumonville but they both reacted to the Mongol conquest Domino served the Mongols children decided to burn his books and retire become a hermit so this painting like the jeong-ho is referring to an earlier style jomfru is going back to glory circa 1110 jen is going back to maybe the fourth century AD this painting it is a stylized archaic image of the great holographic sage Wang Zhi jerk who took inspiration for his cursive calligraphy from the movement of the necks of geese it was very fond of geese so there he is in his pavilion look at the ill logic with which these trees grow interweave blue green landscape style is this idealized world you may see something up in the galleries don't see this detail actually but they find e about 1670 in the Cleveland collection ends with Wang XI jerk looking at the geese getting ready to write his famous preface to the orchid pavilion that's the longer view the scroll actually upstairs ends about here so we don't see this image but it's there and clearly he was inspired by Chen Chen but look at the difference this is very realistic you could build this piece of architecture the trees has a wonderful color but it's altogether more plausible more naturalistic not Jen Jen Jen Jen distant mountains look at them they're actually these triangular shaped mountains that go back to the most ancient way of writing and painting mountains as triangles and even the little hovels here these fat cuts but look childlike so he's evoking a golden age he's invoking a period when China was free from the depredations of the Mongols and that comes very close to another Cleveland painting Turner Orion which is also in this Bluegreen style and has this wonderful detail of a child playing with these geese a geese are the vehicles of the Immortals so this is an immortal landscape at the fantasy world so these men were painting a fantasy world to escape the reality of the politics of the day ruled by the Mongols we won't make any analogies with Mongol rule and rule today in the DC area well go there but politics was never easy and that was true in the Ming Dynasty as well this is one Jemaine painting in 1543 painted for his friend mr. leo who had just retired to Suzhou from a career in Beijing and so this becomes a portrait of mr. Leo and the the pavilion that he's planning to build for himself so one filming again is creating a fantasy image of what mr. Leo's home will look like and so you see these two friends presumably one's a Ming and the owner of the villa sipping tea they're being served by a servant their books and scrolls in the background but look at where this two-story pavilion is it's surrounded by this green foliage as a doorway so in Ming painting you almost always have a bridge to take us from our world across this moat like space into the world of the painting the trees on the outside are barren the trees on the inside are flourishing so we move from an inhospitable world into this enclosed garden where we see mr. Leo and one zooming imagining themselves in the year 15 43 so we're talking about the Renaissance in Europe this was indeed a renaissance in in China now I've avoided talking about other kinds of portraiture because they were almost non-existent in China but portraiture did come into its own in the end of the 16th century early 17th century and paintings like this began to be more common typically portraits were used only for ancestor veneration often when a person died their portrait was painted posthumously so that the family could make offerings to that venerated person this happens to be a living portrait this is the artist we don't know anything about mr. and the artist but this is his uncle his great uncle at the age of 85 so here he is now you're looking at the uncle and he's a quite a petite rather gaunt figure until you look at his body what is going on so clearly the portrait artist wanted to magnify his stature and so one of the conventions of portraiture is you give people this imposing robe with wonderfully angular animated brushstrokes that convey a sense of energy and almost ponderous volume that doesn't I can't believe this guy could fill anywhere near this robe and then he's beautifully represented but there's also kind of stylized almost symmetry to the way in which the creases the nostrils there's very little shading here it's mostly linear so again this is balancing of calligraphic line and naturalism so you have on view one of the great portraits of the end of the 17th early 18th century by a man named user ding painted at the court in Beijing and something similar is going on the face is highly naturalistic but look at the robes they are completely stylized so it's a different concept is he really got this kind of a belly I can't tell but the hands not very naturalistic but the face so the artist has an account for representing the human physiognomies it's facing almost frontal so we can read his auspicious facial features but the rest of the body becomes stylized it becomes calligraphic so he's trying to do two things at once he's telling us this is what the man looked like but when it comes to representing him what really matters is the environment so he's surrounded by auspicious fruits he's got his brush and paper here he's about to write a poem he's surrounded by blossoming plants so everything about this portrait tells us about the man beyond that mask like face so that's the real principle in Chinese art is always to represent a person through the environment here's an example this is by Fujian circa 1500 this is a historical portrait and so this is a man who was responsible for saving one of the early Confucian classics he's shown being he's reciting the classic and giving a commentary to a han dynasty official and is his regional dialect is so thick that his daughter is acting as a translator said in an imperial palace with this beautiful banana grove this craggy rock the craggy rock not unlike the craggy man is really extraordinary in the way he's represented but did he look like that he lived 2,000 years earlier than the painting so undoubtedly it's a little hard to say what he looked like but what's happening is doujin was influenced by Buddhist art so he took his his paradigm the wisemen of Buddhism the low Hansa are hot so he emphasized this broad forehead whiskered face enlarged ears sometimes with an earring so he's using archetypal images to convey something of this man's significance he's using the image from religion to celebrate a Confucian hero so let's look at Rubens paintings of lo Hans there's where that detail comes from notice the long fingernails I don't suggest you try this at home so clearly we've been painting around 1590 was emphasizing these men's eccentric behavior I love this one it reminds me of some Dick Tracy figure like old croon face and this completely abstracted silhouette from the back this fellow who sort of looks very poor sign so what's happening here he's clearly celebrating here's a man who's sat and meditated so long a tree is growing up around him so he's celebrating these oddball figures as a way of saying in Buddhism don't judge somebody by how they look judge them by their character so he's provoking us to believe that these figures are eccentric but at the same time he's saying but they're holy men so when you walk by some homeless person on the street corner might be a low hon in disguise so better offer him some coins so this is great because in Cleveland you have a painting of 500 low haunts the Mets painting we only have 16 we got the bargain deal you guys got the whole deal 500 and here's the same man in a tree now look he's actually a little less he's pretty eccentric looking fellas but he looks like somebody quite respectable not quite the smurfy figure here but clearly there is this interest in conveying the message that these are holy men now you have another great painting not on view right now but this is by ton Home Show and chunhin show lived to witness the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 this was about six years earlier in 1638 he painted this painting for a venerable family member lady Shan one who was commenting on the Confucian classics so here is the venerable old lady she's quite wrinkled and elderly but quite venerated and one of her servants is bringing her commentary there and look at his love of details this is an altar table in front of the lady I love the care with which he's drawn the Phoenix down below the pattern on the textile the patina on the bronze vessel these other accoutrement so we see this man who is not only adept at painting figures but he's really into minuscule detail well the Met happens to own a painting that he did when he was 19 years old so 20 years before ladies gem one painting and it's small it's about eight inches square but this is chunhin show showcasing his abilities as a young man it's a real tour de force but I thought we'd end with this image of tun honk shel this is an album of eight leaves and it starts out with it's basically a commentary on the nature of art pretty impressive for a 19 year old right to tackle that so here's an art of bonsai of miniaturization so taking a landscape and shrinking it down and putting it in a pot well isn't that what painting does don't we take the landscape of the world and shrink it down into a small surface and guess what there's the pine there's the plum there's the bamboo that's the three friends of wintry weather the three images that survived the winter and blossom again in the spring it's about longevity it's about survival it's the moral integrity of the Chinese gentleman put into a beautiful crackle Lord so amazed a wonderful patterns little bit of grass and rock is created a world it's a moralistically ideal world pretty good for eight inches by eight inches now takes us a little bit further this is clearly a basin quite a ornate one if that may be lacquer maybe Jade filled with water it's on this beautiful stand remember the Phoenix it was painted in lady shrine once textiles there they are again we know we're outside however because he's created these little Tufts of leaves and what's this Matthew you know what that is that's the moon this kid is going to be a curator of Chinese art so we were looking at the moon upstairs in a Wong yen painting so this is a reflection of the moon I think about it reflections mirrors that's what art is it's a reflection of the landscape at the reflection of the world so here is the reflection of the moon what's coming next well it's a mirror it's a mirror itself it's one of those great Tong dynasty eight lobes mirrors and what do we see we see a flower admiring itself in the mirror right there's the face of the flower it's leaning over and what's this the ring it's a hairpin and in the ring is a rabbit now if you know your Chinese mythology you know that the rabbit the hare lives in the moon beating out the Elector of immortality for childhood the moon goddess could this be the chin goddesses hairpin and ring and be willing to bet it is so here's a reflection what is the moon it's a reflection of the Sun it's a mirror getting pretty intense right I love it now then ends of the album Sun Hung show says ain't seen nothing yet that's a painting of a flower and I'm even signing the flower with my signature and my seal right on this fan with a stick so southern song style a fan on silk and he says guess what I'm such a good painter that the butterfly flew over it because he thought the flower was real and we see the butterfly partly through the silk you see that pretty neat so those of you who know classical literature and have read your Pliny right you've all read historic a'nature Alice so cleanly in 79 before the eruption of Vesuvius ended his life prematurely he wrote about two Greek painters Zook sees and para hey CEA's & Zuke's e's painted a cluster of grapes so real the birds flew down and started pecking at the painting he said to Paris pop that so Peres he said come to my studio tomorrow though Zook sees arrives and he sees this curtain he said okay move the curtain let's have a look and then he realized the curtain was a painting he said I could fool birds but you could fool an artist you win so here's a 20 year old kid saying how good am I at very least he can fool butterflies he does a pretty good job when pressing me too I have to say so Chinese painting is this extraordinary world it brings us in counters with the natural landscape with flowers with insects with birds with people sometimes the people are embedded in the landscape and that's of course true today as well if you go to China you have a sense the China is this amazingly diverse landscape and the people are equally complex and they're deeply rooted in that soil and in that culture it's a culture that's been around for five thousand years so we in the West really owe it to ourselves to understand that culture that is what the Cleveland Museum what the Metropolitan Museum what all of the great museums in this country are all about Asian art is there for us to study and appreciate as the common heritage of mankind but it's also an entry point the understanding a culture that in the 21st century is going to be very important we should all go back up to the galleries and learn from the works of art there thank you I'm I'm told that I can entertain questions Matthew any questions you're there you're already there but if you have a chance to use the microphone I think there might be a microphone available if somebody wants to ask the question otherwise just yell when the first artist oh the curtain yes so Matthews question is so what's this about the curtain so art is about illusion and one idea of illusion is representing nature so vividly that it looks real it looks three-dimensional so Zook sees could paint grapes that looked like they were 3-dimensional fooling the birds but para hey she has created a painting of a curtain that looked like you could touch it it looked like it was 3-dimensional and so of course it was on a flat surface but it looked like it was three-dimensional so he fooled the other artists into thinking Oh moved the curtain aside I want to see the painting the curtain was the painting and he proved that well he could make a painting that looked three-dimensional that's not always the ideal in China as I think I showed you from the horse painting on three-dimensionality representational naturalistic painting it's only half the story that's the surface of what we see it's the curtain actually it's like The Wizard of Oz what's behind the curtain is more important it's the spirit embedded in the imagery in the hand of the artist itself so it's this balance between the hand of the artist and the content of the painting and so they go together and so when we look at Chinese artists not just to say oh isn't that a pretty picture of a landscape or flowers it's what's underneath the surface of the painting good question though anybody else we have a microphone here if you'd like to this lady here comes the microphone we all want to hear your question and if I don't like it I'm just going to dodge we have Clarissa here to answer the end bill but both answer hard questions I take the easy ones thank you so these paintings are small you even identified you know eight inches by eight inches were the those who have them who owned them who looked at them were they using some kind of a looking glass in order to see the kinds of details I mean you really emphasize wonderfully how important it is to pay attention to those very tiny details of people and boats and so on how were they able to view these things so it's a great question I think that the fact is that when you're holding a work of art so intimately within just a few inches of your face you can really see that detail without the need for magnification it is pretty special to have this kind of driving theater treatment I love it but that just enables us all to sort of get into the picture but it's there for you to discover and sometimes the part of the pleasure is that you're moving through the landscape incrementally I did a film once of a painting a 72 foot long painting southern inspection tour for kangxi emperor circus 1690s with David Hockney and we took the painting to LA and we rolled it out on the floor of the atrium in LA County museums all 72 feet and we laid down a track and we had a dolly with a camera and we rolled it along all 72 feet and then we looked at the outtakes and we said that is nuts nobody looks at a painting like that you're always looking in out backs forth you're exploring the interspaces of the painting so the idea of a steady-state camera for this uniform distance is the wrong way to look at a painting even though it's correct that you're moving from right to left it's never that static you're always diving into the painting and the thing about Chinese landscape painting is there's a moving perspective so you may see a recession going that way and then you see someone this way David Hockney is doing a new show opening you just I think if it did the Tate Modern now but it's going to Paris and it's coming to the Met in November he just sent me some pictures his latest paintings are trapezoidal because Chinese paintings actually use a kind of trapezoidal sense of expanding space rather than receding to a single point perspective so came to the Met to look at paintings back in the early 80s so we've been friends since then and he's taught me a lot about looking so good question thank you a burning question here I feel like an auctioneer would you raise your hand again and we'll bring you a microphone you thank you sold to the lady in black here and wrote Q you just donated to the Cleveland Museum Chinese painting fund these are thousand dollar questions by the way don't be inhibited all right I might have missed something but when you come up with these symbols and like the saree speak into the microphone okay I'm sorry when you come when you come when you come up with the various symbols that are hidden to people who are not the cognoscenti is that based on on the like things like the poems that are written on the on the paintings or on historical documents or in Diaries or speculate speculation or some combination great question so there are these there's a whole universe of symbolic symbolic language pine trees they in green for the winter plum bamboo you go upstairs you'll see a pine tree a bamboo and a plum on view clarissa has done a great job of celebrating the new year with the three friends all on view along with some peonies so yes literary commentaries where we see the invocation of these natural images is one source of inspiration the Wang men painting upstairs of plum blossoms actually doesn't mention the word plum once he talks about the moon punching through the clouds he talks about a crane flying up in the sky it talks about a lady leaning on a balustrade or you look at the plum tree it looks like the plum is leaning on its own trunk so it's the metaphor the plum is a metaphor for a beautiful lady we know this is true because they're paintings of plum trees one of them famous is written on by young maids a queen of the time the Empress who talks about her fading beauty and how the flowers inevitably the blossoms drop so we know from Chinese literature that these images are laden with meaning and that it's valuable and we see often in the poems written directly on the paintings that the artist is invoking that imagery and expanding on it so to do a painting plum blossoms and talk about a beautiful lady and a flying crane there's no crane in the painting either there's no lady in the painting it's just the plum in the moon but he's enlarging our sense of this he's also talks about music playing over the water there's no water in the painting so yes how do you get beyond that image to this richer cultural mid-year it's something that the Chinese are constantly invoking so we have this is a culture where people can read Confucius we're talking about people reading a text that was written 2,500 years ago so they've had a long time to absorb the poetic and literary tropes of the past and that is also true of the writing of calligraphy when you see calligraphy they are invoking earlier styles of calligraphy so a connoisseur of calligraphy says ah his work he's writing in the long sheet your style or hey that one thing Jen he's clearly soft why su so we look at the style as a language also that's why John Wong who was painting in a discreet style of washi but he emptied out all the ink washing he reduced it to the bones of the landscape that's how Sherman Lee described it Damo fool painted the bones of the landscape got rid of the ink wash all of the evocation of atmosphere just focused on the lines so a Sherman was there he understood good question yes please I'll repeat the question so sometimes the songwriters they have the lyrics first or they have the music first which came first in Chinese painting was it the words or the images I think the words were in the person's head oftentimes and so the images images have their own history just as music has its own history so music may be referring to earlier sound so if you have Beethoven early Beethoven sounds a lot like late Mozart clearly he was influenced by that so there's that linear tradition and then there are the poetic traditions and they're so intimately integrated I think it'd be really hard to say which comes first I think songwriters they often have a melody first and then the word somehow come along but maybe they were dreaming of somebody in particular when they wrote the lyrics of the music so it's a great question I don't think there's one simple answer but I love the question there's a lady back here raise your hand again that's it thank you so during the era of Malta don't the Chinese artists develop any new or particular visual languages or pictorial conceits absolutely social realist art was very important red as a color was very important you get these traditional landscape painters they'll put a power line a train and a red flag in their landscape what's that all about or smoke stacks right smoke stacks were a good thing back in the Maoist era now they're not so good anymore so there was definitely an iconography of social realism so that was learned from the Russians in particular so figure painting was valued anybody who is a landscape painter better put a red flag or a power line in their painting or they would really be seen as bourgeois running dog capitalist so yes the Maoist era was the time when traditional artists were really punished if they persisted in doing traditional iconography sir now the mention that era I'm kind of curious I heard there's a lot of destruction of much of the old Chinese art of you know the ancient art a lot of it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution do you know how much of it remains is there more to be a recovered and found at all there's a lot of it still in China I mean break that down like do we have much left or it easily a few fragments that we really have you know after that have been so the Cultural Revolution was a disastrous time for China in many ways but the one of the great losses was the works of art that were vandalized by the red guard particularly Buddhist temples were suffered a great deal but the major collections were largely secured Joanne lie is said to have personally ordered troops to guard that Forbidden City for example so the red guards wouldn't bring their depredations to the collection but what happened was people who owned works of art were so frightened that if they were found to possess these works of art they would be castigated punished so they often destroyed them themselves so many private collectors maybe few of them buried them a lot of them donated them to the museum's so there was a huge influx as there was after 1949 when many of the elite either fled the country or were put to death or suffered and their properties were seized so Cultural Revolution there were warehouses filled of Chinese furniture for example so Bob Ellsworth the famous dealer at the time had his pick of things in these warehouses because they're looking for foreign exchange foreign currencies at the time so there was a huge amount that was either seized my favorite story is this man from Taiwan who is studying in Berkeley and he expressed an interest in 19th century paintings and so the friendship store in Beijing said here's a list of 10,000 paintings what do you want he said how am I supposed to pick from a list why don't you send them to me they sent a whole container he went through them he bought 6,000 I think he paid about $100 apiece it's the greatest collection of 19th century Chinese paintings anywhere because they weren't valued in China and so they got six million dollars and he got six thousand paintings so at least we know not all the paintings were destroyed but there was a great deal of was destroyed and nowadays unfortunately some of these Buddhist temples are being rebuilt with modern replicas or just stand-ins for the traditional sculpture which are they're terrible really bad so it's sort of disney-esque conversions of Buddhism so there was a lot of loss so the fact that we have these great sculptures in the Cleveland collection I don't think China has a legitimate claim when they have destroyed so much of their own patrimony so I think we have to remember that and put these things in perspective that yes it's true that in the early 20th century in the years after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 there was a lot of chaos in China many of these important temple sites were pillaged for people to survive they wanted to get currency but they're protected and they're on view and they have a great didactic purpose and meaning here so while we can be cognizant of the fact that these things were taken from China under dubious circumstances they also have survived and been appreciated by a wider audience and I think that's also legitimate so it's a very complicated narrative about provenance thank you for the question maybe one more question we have a couple more questions three boys the bidding is really intense $2,000 yes yes my question is do contemporary Chinese artists continue to use this calligraphy style in portraying modern themes so the modern calligraphy there of course calligraphy now it calligraphy used to be absolutely essential everybody wrote with a brush that's no longer the case people write with ballpoint pens they write with computers so the practice of calligraphy has really become either an avocation to do in your spare time or you become a full-time artist and you've got 2,000 years of telegraphic history to overcome to create something original and new that's quite a challenge so a lot of artists like the one I showed you early on in my lecture wonged only he started doing these big abstractions they look like Franz Kline or maybe Robert Motherwell a but they're done with calligraphic expertise with a sense of what a calligraphic brush can do Franz Kline mapped out what he was going to do it looks spontaneous it's not at all spontaneous it's very carefully constructed it's very calculated while dueling's are sometimes it works sometimes he doesn't he he wrote something out for me he threw out the first three draft he didn't like them before he actually did something he liked so that's the option the calligrapher has so today calligraphy is continued to be practiced but to actually bring it into the realm of high art it has to be very very exceptional and oftentimes it becomes quite individualistic in in ways that are strange provocative abstract for sure so only a handful of practitioners are working so when I did Clarissa mentioned I did a show on contemporary art ink art I called it it actually it ended up with photography and video and all these other things too the concept of mining tradition is very complicated but the use of calligraphic brush work to create something new I could have filled the met entire metropolitan museum of art with the millions of amateur calligraphers in China today but it's only those people who are doing something really new and exciting that actually make it into what I can see their high art so it's it's it's a new challenge it's a new age and most of these calligraphers are not unaware of Western art they are looking at the abstract art of the abstract expressionist in particular and their scale of their writing is become much bigger so just like they see the Alex Katz show downstairs right he starts small but by the 1960s he's making everything bigger so figure isn't necessarily better but it it challenges you to see something in a totally new light and that's happening in China too I think Jo you have the floor and here's a microphone I think we always talk about the 20th century as being the American Century I'm not so sure we can claim that ground for the 21st century but whether it's the world's largest polluter or the world's largest economy or the world's largest population China has got a lot going for it good and bad and so I think we are going to have to reckon with a culture that has you know we were founded in the chin long period in America Chen long dismissed Lord McCartney in 1795 he says we have everything in great abundance in our country we have no need for the English monarchs attentions so I think China is learning that they're part of the world they have to reach out and become part of a larger global economy and global political world and clearly America is going to have to remember that lesson and meet China halfway I hope but I think we'd be very mistaken to feel that we were secure either behind our ocean moats or that we can go it alone I think we are going to have to find a cooperative relationship and that starts by respect and understanding who our fellow human beings are and China is probably the most significant culture I think to to cope with in the years to come so I feel like we need to use art as a way to interpret that I just hosted a panel with the Council on Foreign Relations and we talked about how the Qin and Han dynasties created a foundation for understanding modern China I thought that was really neat the idea that we had this high-powered group of journalists and economists were saying who we want to understand Xi Jinping we better start 2,000 years ago two thousand years ago in America we were a different world but China was already a unified Empire the size of the Roman Empire and they set the laws and the templates for their culture for the next two millennia and in many ways Xi Jinping is not so different from Mao Zedong not so different from the Emperors of China there is a centralization of power that is extraordinary but there's also this amazing talent when you apply to Harvard you have one of maybe twenty people get except gets rejected for every person's gets accepted in Beijing University everyone one of a hundred people it's accepted you better believe those people at Beijing University are very smart and very capable so we have a lot to learn thank you very much
