Location: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy galleries, 2nd floor
Dates: September 13, 2003-January 25, 2004
An exhibition focusing on the 17th-century landscape painting of China's Nanjing School will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 13. Comprising nearly 60 works, Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in Seventeenth-Century China will highlight works created by "leftover subjects" of the Ming dynasty, who lived in and around Nanjing during the early years of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1911). For these loyalist artists, images of landscape – often inspired by Yellow Mountain – symbolized survival, resistance, and reclusion in response to alien rule. Including works from the Museum's permanent holdings as well as loans from East Coast collections, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive presentation of such landscapes ever mounted in the United States.
The exhibition is made possible by The Eighteen Friends.
In 1644, the Manchus, a semi-nomadic people from an area northeast of the Great Wall, occupied Beijing, the capital of the Ming state, and proclaimed their own Qing (Pure) dynasty. In response, many Chinese scholars declined government service and turned to the arts to earn a living, often seeking refuge and inspiration in nature. Two of the most important regional artistic centers of this period were the cosmopolitan metropolis and the former Ming capital of Nanjing and the rugged wilderness environs
of Yellow Mountain. These centers served as complementary poles in the urban-rural continuum of Chinese life, and both city dwellers and rural residents found in landscape depictions a quintessential reflection of enduring cultural and moral values.
Situated on the lower Yangzi River, Nanjing was a transportation hub for the prosperous Jiangnan region. As the secondary "southern capital," Nanjing played host
to a large bureaucracy of scholar-officials whose nominal government appointments left them time to patronize the arts. The city was also the site of the province's triennial civil service examinations, which brought thousands of aspiring candidates to the city. The city's fabled entertainment district also attracted numerous wealthy clients. Nanjing's cosmopolitan population continued to patronize the arts under the Manchus, sustaining both local artists, many of whom made a specialty of depicting scenes of the city, and artists from neighboring cultural centers in Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang Provinces, who resided in or visited Nanjing, making the city a nexus for different artistic styles.
Yellow Mountain (Mount Huang or Huangshan) is a place of dramatic natural beauty located in southern Anhui Province. It rises above a cluster of villages and towns where, in late Ming times, budding entrepreneurs established family fortunes through the exploitation of such local resources and products as timber, bamboo, paper, and ink. As these merchant families expanded their activities to Nanjing and the prosperous salt distribution center of Yangzhou, they brought a taste for depictions of Anhui scenery with them. Many Anhui artists chose to follow their patrons to these cosmopolitan centers.
In both Nanjing and the countryside beyond the city, therefore, early Qing painters created landscape images that celebrated their homeland, their cultural heritage, their loyalty to the fallen Ming, and their determination to survive and endure, transforming the genre of landscape painting into a morally and politically charged art.
For several decades after the Manchu conquest, Nanjing served as the focus of Ming loyalist sentiment and clandestine activities. The first gallery will include works by
three loyalist artists: the Nanjing poet-painter Zhang Feng (active ca. 1636-62), the leader of the so-called Yellow Mountain School of painters Hongren (1610-1664), and the devout Buddhist monk Kuncan (1612-1673). All three adopted painting styles that
pointedly recall the brush idioms of 14th-century scholar-artists who lived through similarly chaotic times at the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1260-1279), and they created landscape images that embody their varied responses to the Manchu conquest. Zhang Feng's superb album of landscapes, Hangren's Dragon Pine, and Kuncan's Wooded Mountains at Dusk will be shown in this gallery.
The second and third galleries will feature the works by the Jinling Masters, a group of Nanjing professional painters who were particularly effective in exploiting the album format. Through the works, the development of a distinctive Nanjing style will be examined. On view will be Ye Xin's (active ca. 1640-1673) masterpiece, Landscapes, which fuses descriptive realism and poetic feeling to achieve exquisite evocations of place and mood.
The next two galleries will present works by the Anhui masters. During the Ming dynasty, the Anhui and Jiangsu provinces were joined as a single administrative unit centered in the southern capital of Nanjing. A characteristic style of the so-called Yellow Mountain School – austere and monochrome – was absorbed rapidly and adapted by the leading Anhui painters: Xiao Yuncong (1596-1673), Mei Qing (1624-1697), and Dai Benxiao (1621-1693). Among the works in these galleries are exquisite albums by Mei Qing (Landscapes after Ancient Masters, 1693) and Dai Benxiao (Landscapes, ca. 1690).
The confluence of styles in Nanjing in the later 17th century resulted in a pluralistic
arts scene in which some artists developed styles that fused multiple sources. The sixth gallery will include works by one such painter, Liu Yu (1620-after 1689), who
integrated influences from both highly individualistic painters such as Gong Xian (1619-1689) and artists working in a more tradition-bound manner, such as the Orthodox School painter Wang Hui (1632-1717).
The next gallery will introduce one of the most outstanding artists of the early Qing period, Zhu Ruoji (1642-1707), who is better known by his assumed name Shitao ("Stone Wave"). He created one of the most original landscape styles of the 17th century. On view will be his early masterpiece The Sixteen Luohans – a testament to his talent, technical skill, and spiritual devotion – and a fine example of his late work, Drunk in Autumn Woods.
The final gallery will feature Gong Xian (1619-1689), the most famous scholar-artist identified with Nanjing. Living a reclusive life, he created brooding, visionary landscapes, which have been characterized as "uniquely subtle and strange." As Gong said of himself, "there has been no one before me and there will be no one after me." Particularly noteworthy among his nine works featured in the exhibition are Landscapes and Trees and Sixteen Ink Landscapes with Poems.
Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in Seventeenth-Century China is organized by Maxwell H. Hearn, Curator in the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Two lectures will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition on Sunday, September 28, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium: at 2:00 p.m., "Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in 17th-Century China" by Mr. Hearn, and at 3:15,
"Real and Imaginary Spaces in Paintings of Yangzhou and Nanjing" by Jonathan Hay of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. These lectures are free to the public with Museum admission.
The exhibition will be featured on the Museum's Web site, www.metmuseum.org.
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