Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Su Shi dismissed realism—which would obsess Western artists for the next eight hundred years—as “the insight of a child”; he also rejected art that served the state. Western art of the Middle Ages remains intensely formal, but Su Shi’s calligraphy bespeaks an almost expressionist realm of the personal. His is an art of process and artistic transformation, and as a viewer you are invited to join him in his journey. Poems Written at Hangzhou on the Cold-Food Festival is sad but also redemptive, for what is revealed is the struggle to know a self. Nine hundred and fourteen years later, its ashes, blown, still stir to life.

Splendors includes several important Yuan paintings. Yuan painting is somewhat harder for a Western audience to understand than Song painting. The Yuan painters were striving for complete simplicity of style and subject, the imagination given free rein within tight confines. The painter Wu Zhen spoke of “flavor within blandness” when he rejected the theatricality of Song styles.

Huang Gongwang created the long hand-scroll Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, between 1347 and 1350. Song artists had risen to the peak of naturalistic representation, hiding the brushstroke by using washes; they wished to delete themselves graphically from their work. Huang’s brushstrokes, like his sentiments, are everywhere apparent, as if he were writing the letters of his own heart.

Also coming to the Met is Emperor Huizong’s Two Poems, a fine example of his “slender gold” calligraphy. Done more than three centuries later than Huaisu’s piece, it stands in sharp contrast to it. Scholar James Cahill writes, “Each character, occupying its assigned space, exhibits order and stasis, as if engraved in stone.” Huizong was an incompetent emperor, ambitious about building great public gardens and vague about running the country, but he was a glorious patron and practitioner of the arts. “Only through creativity,” he wrote, “does one’s merit remain behind.”

Splendors reflects and includes the merit of Chinese emperors, which sometimes lies more tangibly in paintings and calligraphy than in political achievement or military conquest. Wen Fong’s catalogue, significantly titled Possessing the Past, is in some ways an embarrassment to the Met. The cover shows Guo Xi’s Early Spring, which is not in the exhibition. The copyright page thanks Acer for the corporate sponsorship it withdrew. And the text refers at some length to work that will probably never be seen in this country, all of it illustrated in glowing color. (“Well, at least you have your book,” de Montebello told Fong when it looked as if the show would miscarry altogether.) Still, the book uses techniques of connoisseurship to narrate a thousand-year evolution of the idea of painting and calligraphy, balancing social and formal art histories. It explicates the force that won these Chinese masterpieces their canonical position and the force that canonical position has afforded them.

Possessing the Past also seems to tell over and over the story of what happened in Taiwan in January, because this disaffection between a beleaguered population and an autocratic elite has recurred across many dynasties of Chinese rule. “How much high Chinese culture is there in China?” Fong asked me one evening this winter. “It’s all Western. So much has been lost and forgotten by Chinese people in the last hundred and fifty years. What they still have is so precious, but being proud of your heritage and having the will to understand it are two different things.”

Some protesters in January spoke of the need for an exhibition in Taiwan of European art, as grand as Splendors, that would include everything from the Venus de Milo to Guernica. They might want to call such an exhibition Escaping the Past, because traditional Western art looks mostly forward (neoclassicism and postmodernism notwithstanding) while traditional Chinese art tends to look back. Emphasis on the future is a point of contention in Taiwan’s politics, and the Palace Museum symbolizes the case against novelty. Exhibitions there tend not to propose new ideas so much as to reveal old ones.

In fact, the surging New Party, which led the protests, advocates eventual reunification, an ultimate means of possessing the past. The battle over the Palace Museum collection suggests that the next struggle may be over the terms of unification rather than about the sort of wide-eyed independence that has swept Eastern Europe. Like most historical art exhibitions, Splendors of Imperial China is about the past. More than most others, it may be about the future as well.