Review

The Three Perfections

By Sonja Kelley

Exhibition review of Vision and Verse: The Poetry of Chinese Painting

February 3 - June 16, 2024 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Chinese art galleries at the Met were the most crowded I had ever seen them.

As I approached, people in the hallways casually wandered into my path as I tried to hurry around them, making me wonder if the throngs that normally descend on the Egyptian galleries downstairs had finally made their way to the second floor. In my experience, galleries of Asian art in the United States are often the quietest places in an art museum, which normally makes me wish these works of art drew more attention from American audiences. Yet, I found myself a little flustered that the day such a large audience showed up was the same day that I wanted my own undisturbed time with the art.

I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Vision and Verse: The Poetry of Chinese Painting on the day it opened: the first Saturday in February—a week before the Lunar New Year. Of course the Met had planned numerous special events that had drawn large crowds. Calligraphy activities for children were being held in the hallway outside the main entrance to the Chinese painting galleries. For adults there were poetry readings held in the Astor Chinese Garden Court, which sits in the middle of the China galleries.

I arrived just as a reading was about to start, so I decided to sit down and listen to these contemporary poets before viewing the paintings. The authors were all women of Asian descent who had recently published books of their own poetry: Eugenia Leigh, Anni Liu, and Sally Wen Mao. The event was perfectly suited to its setting. The Astor Chinese Garden Court, completed in 1981, was inspired by the Garden of the Master of Nets in Suzhou, China, a celebrated model of the classical Chinese garden style that was widespread by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). This space in the museum brings to mind the home of a wealthy and highly educated member of the literati. His garden would have been a place for his quiet contemplation, a retreat from the busy-ness of the city, and as such a suitable place to read and write poetry and also to share that poetry with guests.

Vision and Verse draws entirely on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s own holdings—a testament to the great strength of the Met’s collection of premodern Chinese painting. It focuses on paintings tied to the centuries-old tradition in China of pairing images and poetry, often with calligraphy inscribed into the sky of landscape scenes or onto separate pieces of paper mounted alongside the painting. The text may be composed by the painter or someone else, written onto the paper or silk at the same time the painting was made or perhaps later. The poem may respond to the scene depicted, or the reverse may be true. In some cases, several different texts are inscribed onto one painting. In all cases, the image and text inform one another, and both are likely to contain symbols and allusions that require considerable knowledge on the part of the viewer.

The Met’s exhibition is arranged roughly chronologically, and its earliest paintings date to the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) and reference poems going back to the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), a compilation of poetry dating to 1000-600 BCE. Two paintings in the show are illustrations of the Odes by the court painter Ma Hezhi ⾺和之 that were most likely commissioned by Gaozong ⾼宗, the first emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty. With his family having just lost the northern regions of China to invaders from the north, Gaozong had Ma Hezhi illustrate more than three hundred poems from the Odes, with the text of each poem written alongside each painting (likely by a scribe) in Gaozong’s personal style of calligraphy. In doing so, the new emperor was drawing on ancient stories of “good” rulers from Chinese antiquity to help establish the legitimacy of his own rule. One of Ma’s paintings on display is Courtly Odes, Beginning with "Wild Geese” (figure 1). The poem praises King Xuan, who helped establish order among people displaced by war.

The wild geese are flying;

Suk, suk go their wings.

The soldiers are on the march;

Painfully they struggle through the wilds.

In dire extremity are the strong men;

Sad are their wives, left all alone.

 

The wild geese are flying;

They have lighted in the middle of the marsh.

The soldiers are walling a fort;

The hundred cubits have all risen.

Though they struggle so painfully,

At last they are safely housed.

 

The wild geese are flying;

Dolefully they cry their discontent.

But these were wise men

Who urged us in our toil,

And those were foolish men

Who urged us to make mischief and rebel.[1]

The painting itself is a simple natural scene—geese landing in a clump of bamboo on the water’s edge. A pair of geese is a symbol of joined complementary forces and therefore marital bliss. A larger group of them can represent society itself, and a lone goose by extension suggests loss—of a partner or of a community. The geese in the ancient poem here can be read as society disrupted, in disarray. In Ma Hezhi’s painting we see the geese coming together in one space, suggesting the return of stability at the hands of King Xuan. A viewer with knowledge of the common tropes of Chinese painting would also know that bamboo, which can bend quite far without breaking, symbolizes strength in the face of adversity. Having read the poem, we can surmise why Ma included this particular plant in his illustration. As with much Chinese ink painting, Courtly Odes, Beginning with "Wild Geese” can be pleasing to any viewer, but fully understanding it requires not only a general cultural understanding but also a knowledge of classic Chinese texts. Only those who can read the poem and know the history of the text will understand the tragedy it evokes and the story of successful leadership it tells.

The first two rooms of the exhibition include paintings that reference ancient collections of poems, focusing on the Book of Odes and the Nine Songs 九歌圖 (c.4th century BCE). The paintings in the next few rooms are organized according to the following time periods or cultural movements: the Six Dynasties Period (220-589CE), Chan/Zen Buddhism, the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

The Chan/Zen Buddhist section, unlike much of the rest of the show, includes English translations of all the poems on the paintings, perhaps due to their short length. Ironically, it also includes a poem expressing an ambivalent attitude to a text:

In this volume of scripture,

The words have no clear meaning.

The sun rises, the moon sets,

When will I finish reading it?[2]

That sentiment is inscribed on the painting Reading a Sutra by Moonlight (figure 2), an example of “apparition painting” —an intentionally faint image meant to remind the viewer of the illusory nature of the world in which we live. The Chan/Zen school of Buddhism takes a generally skeptical view of texts, de-emphasizing their ability to transmit the kind of knowledge that can actually help adherents achieve enlightenment. The image is of an elderly monk holding back the hair of his eyebrow as he read the paper in his hand. There is a faint suggestion of a pine tree trunk behind him and its needles at the top of the painting. The artist has used the darkest paint to quickly sketch the outline of his robe and to make the dots of his eyes, drawing our attention to his hunched posture as he struggles with the text.

The final galleries of the exhibition focus on the “three perfections” (三 絕), the combination of painting, poetry, and calligraphy in a unified work by one artist. This part of the exhibition gives considerable attention to the poems inscribed on the paintings, providing English translations of most of the inscriptions. Spring Dawn over the Elixir Terrace (figure 3) by Lu Guang 陸廣 is an example.

For ten years I wandered, homeless and away from worldly entanglements;

Now, returning home by the river, I see things differently from most others.

Jade like vapor floating in the sky, it is spring but no rain;

Elixir rays emitted from a well turn into clouds at dawn.

Standing in the wind I lean on my dragon staff;

I have long missed hearing your mouth-organ music by moonlight.

I am happy to be with the venerable immortal, and away from the military strategists;

We sit looking at paintings and talk about literature.[3]

The painting is a monochrome depiction of a temple nestled in the valleys of a vertical mountain formation. The water at the lowest point in the painting gives way to rolling rock forms that support scattered trees. A clear walking path is not visible except for the bridge a traveler could cross to reach the temple in the distance. Above the large temple, several craggy peaks rise into the sky, and others emerge from mist in the distance. This composition is a “monumental” mountain landscape, a setting often seen in even the oldest surviving examples of Chinese ink painting. Such landscapes are not depictions of “real” places; they are imagined scenes often used to comment on the conditions of contemporary society. Lu Guang created this painting at the very beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when the country had returned to Chinese rule after being under the control of the Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). The reference to “spring” in the title signals Lu’s optimism about a new beginning for the country after years of disorder. The “elixir terrace” in the painting points to the Daoist beliefs that inform Lu’s understanding of the cosmic forces that enliven this natural scene, but it is in the poem that he most directly expresses his relief that the recent fighting has ended. The final line of the poem presents painting and writing themselves as places of refuge. This view of these intertwined art forms is present throughout this exhibition—the combination of image and text creates a place where the artist-poet finds freedom from the cares of the world.  In this artistic tradition, the paintings often depict only the place the artist longs to escape to. The verse suggests the problem he seeks to flee.

Vision and Verse presents a tradition of combining image and text that is exclusive, with the meaning of the paintings and poems fully accessible only to a limited, highly educated audience. Presenting this material to a public that does not read Chinese and is not familiar with Chinese history or its ancient texts is inevitably challenging. The poetry reading that was held in the galleries for the Lunar New Year celebration, however, attracted a large audience and showed the enthusiasm museum-goers have for experiencing poetry. The poets who participated in the event had been given a private tour of the exhibition before it opened, and a couple of them said they had a particular affinity for the poetry of the Tang dynasty, with its focus on exile and the feelings of dislocation and loss felt during periods of war and political disruption. Anni Liu connected with that ancient tradition by reading her poem “Xi’an Nocturne with Jasmine and Pears,” in which she explores her relationship with Xi’an (the city of her birth) and the impact on her and her mother of leaving that city to move to America.[4] By helping to bridge the gap between the American museum audience and China’s rich tradition of painting and poetry, the reading was a success—and suggests that giving more attention to the poems that are part of the paintings included in the galleries could help attract more attention to this rich tradition.

[1] Translation by Arthur Waley provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Courtly Odes, Beginning with 'Wild Geese,’” accessed February 25, 2024, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40052. The original Chinese:

鴻鴈之什

鴻鴈，美宣王也。萬⺠離散，不安其居。⽽能勞來還，定安集之。⾄于矜寡，無不得其所焉。鴻鴈于⾶，肅肅其⽻。之⼦于征，劬勞于野。爰及矜⼈，哀此鰥寡。

鴻鴈于⾶，集于中澤。之⼦于垣，百堵皆作。雖則劬勞，其究安宅。鴻鴈于⾶，哀鳴嗷嗷。維此哲⼈，謂我劬勞。維彼愚⼈，謂我宣驕。

[2] Translation from Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th– 14th Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 361. Provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Reading a Sutra by Moonlight,” accessed February 25, 2024, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40516.  The original Chinese:

只這⼀卷經，字字無分曉。

⽇出⽉又落，幾時看得了。

[3] Translation from Maxwell K. Hearn and Wen Fong. “Silent Poetry: Chinese Paintings in the Douglas Dillon Galleries,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 39, no. 3 (Winter 1981/82): 39. Provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Spring Dawn Over the Elixir Terrace,’” accessed February 25, 2024, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42328. The original Chinese:

⼗年客邸絕塵紛，江上歸來思不羣。

⽟氣浮空春不⾬，丹光出井曉成雲。

⾵前⿓杖時堪倚，⽉下鸞笙久不聞。幸對仙翁遠孫⼦，坐中觀畫又論⽂。

[4] Published in Anni Liu, Border Vista Poems (New York: Persea Books, 2022), 58.