Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Last October, I attended the celebrations for the Palace Museum’s seventieth anniversary. The Song dynasty (960 to 1279 AD) is to China what the Renaissance is to the West, and for the anniversary exhibition, the museum had brought out its greatest masterworks by Guo Xi and Fan Kuan. The issues of representation at which the West arrived after the invention of photography—those complex webs of abstraction and uncertainty that were opened up by Cézanne and taken up by Picasso and Duchamp—can be read in these Chinese works from a thousand years ago. The same paintings can be interpreted historically and contextually; artists of this era invested their work with secret political signals, using painting to communicate what was forbidden. Such painting is also full of a native vocabulary: every tree has its meaning, sometimes multiple meanings: plum trees, for example, can refer to sexual potency among old men or to someone surviving a harsh winter; a plum tree that grows in a back palace courtyard can symbolize a neglected lady whose beauty has passed, or, by extension, a courtier who was favored but is no longer sought by the emperor. Pine trees are held to be principled gentlemen for staying green all through the winter while other trees change color. Each season means something, each kind of rock, each enveloping cloud of mist.

This work both reflects and demands a specific, meditative, exalted state of mind. Nearly one thousand years ago, Guo Xi—whose Early Spring shows a dynamic feeling of movement and excitement, half fantasy and half reality—wrote, “It has been said that there are landscape paintings one can walk through, landscapes that can be gazed upon, landscapes in which one may ramble, and landscapes in which one may dwell. . . . If one looks with the heart of the forest and the streams, they will be lofty. But if one approaches them with an arrogant eye, they will appear diminished.”

Guo Xi was the court painter for the exuberant new emperor Shenzong, who had come to power in 1067, five years before Early Spring was painted, bringing with him dramatic plans—the New Policy—to change China. Early spring is the time of renewal and change, and the painting is an allegory for the political reworking and social reordering of the society: peasants and fishermen are at the bottom of the picture, monks just above, an official on horseback a bit higher than that. It is an entire peaceful but shifting hierarchy revealed in layers. Mists obscure certainty, but at the height of the painting is a perfect clarity, for at the helm of the society was the exquisite conviction of Shenzong. Despite that flattery, the painting is honest, too; it lacks compositional stability, as befits the beginning of a new emperor’s reign. Next to Fan Kuan’s earthier Travelers amid Streams and Mountains, which is dated about fifty years earlier, Early Spring looks like an explosion of whim and air.

Nowhere else can you see such works side by side and thereby understand so much of the ethos and aesthetics of dynastic China. The museum where the Imperial Collection is housed opened in Taipei in 1965, though the Palace Museum was officially established in 1925 in Beijing. The seventieth anniversary was celebrated in both Taipei (where the collection resides) and Beijing (where the name Palace Museum is used to refer to the Forbidden City); in Taipei, you felt as if you were at the Pope’s birthday dinner in Avignon. I was with a New York delegation that included Philippe de Montebello and Wen Fong. We were shepherded into an auditorium for lectures, then to a party. President Lee Teng-hui, the prime minister, and the most important legislators from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party were in attendance, but virtually no one from the art world was present. De Montebello called it “the most peculiar museum event I have ever attended.” The officials whirled around Fong; I could little have guessed what rage against him I was to encounter three months later.

If there were an emperor in Taiwan, he would probably choose to live in the Palace Museum. Situated on a green mountain at the northern edge of Taipei, the hyper-Chinese building reigns over and embraces the city at its feet. If you lean over the carved banister that runs up its 130 marble steps, you can take succor from the gardens below: the pools of carp, as happy as the Taoist writer Zhuangzi could imagine; the pines, emblematic of the Confucian virtue of constancy; the tea-drinking pavilions, crowded with schoolchildren on field trips; and the beautiful rocks, to which young brides come daily to have their wedding portraits made.