Mountains and Water: Exploring the Chinese Handscroll (Part 1)

The Chinese galleries at the Metropolitan have been designed to be a harmonious setting for the works of art that are shown here. We've tried very hard to emulate some of the traditional architectural elements that you would find in a Chinese house, but at the same time, in order to protect these Chinese paintings, both from too much light and from the atmosphere, we've had to encase them in modern glass cases that make it difficult to really appreciate the paintings the way they would have been used and handled in real life. It really takes a painting like this one, the Apricot Garden, for us to get some notion of how these paintings would originally have been handled and viewed. It's a work that documents a gathering that took place on April 6th in 1437, and it's an extraordinary gathering because it brings together some of the most powerful political figures of the time. These men were all grand secretaries, members of the emperor's inner circle who were ruling the country while he was still a young man and unable to rule by himself. Yet interestingly, they chose not to be portrayed in their official settings, but rather they wanted to be shown relaxing in an informal setting, in fact, within a garden. I almost can put myself back into the Apricot Garden in the 15th century, and because these men have left poems about what they were feeling, what they were experiencing, you have a sense that you're almost engaged in a conversation with them, enjoying this extraordinary gathering. Virtually everything that you see in the garden we find in our galleries on display, but of course what the painting does is it really shows us how these things functioned together, how they were lived with and enjoyed by the people of the time. One of the most exciting things for me is the ability to actually handle these works of art and to recognize that each time you roll through them, you physically experience the painting, as well as visually experience it. We're in the museum storeroom now, where we have an opportunity to handle and look at a scroll, to experience the work of art the way it was meant to be viewed. The whole process of opening the scroll actually becomes something of a ritual in which we move from the time and place that we're in now to the time and place where the scroll painting takes us. Each time I unroll the scroll, I have a sense of expectation, of what am I going to see? And throughout this physical process, you can look for clues to what the artist intended. Each of these brocade sheets, and there are several of them, are called goshui, or motes. And the idea is that the patterned silk actually forms a kind of dividing line that separates the outside world from the world of the painting itself. As we unroll the scroll further, we also see various collector seals placed on the mounting. These red stamps are marks of ownership that later collectors, including emperors, have added to the painting. They're not viewed as desecrations of the work of art, rather they're seen as enhancements. Because this is a short hand scroll, we can actually unroll the entire length of the painting in a single sweep. If it were a longer landscape, we would unroll it about an arm's length apart and view it section by section. Also, we are expected to weave the landscape from the right to the left. This work is painted on silk, and over time the color, which would have been a paler cream, is darkened with age. Using monochrome tones of ink, the artist has constructed a sense of recession into space with a technique known as the three distances. He has elements in the foreground, middle ground, and the far distance. They recede in space because they change in scale, and there's also a change in ink tone from dark to light to suggest the veiling effects of atmosphere as we look into the distance. Right in the middle of the landscape are two prominent seals that tell us a great deal about the imperial pedigree of this painting. The later one, the larger and more prominent one, belongs to the 18th century emperor Qianlong. He's chosen a place next to a much earlier seal, one that would have been added about 1100 by the emperor Huizong, who was a great connoisseur and collector. So we're obviously in the presence of a painting of extraordinary age, but what also becomes apparent as we look more carefully at the painting is that we're also in the presence of a real masterpiece. The way in which the artist has constructed the space and created a kind of drama about what is going on here really draws us in, and we see that there is a kind of rhythm to the way he employs these very simple motifs to tell a story, to convey a feeling, a mood, a sense of time and season. And all of that is suggested effectively in this painting by Guo Xi. We see these two fishermen, and their forms are echoed by a pair of gnarled trees here in the foreground. Then we encounter a pair of birds, probably geese, flying towards the distant mountains, and as we follow the trajectory of the birds, we actually see another pair of figures, two travelers who are moving into the misty distance along a little pathway and a small bridge. The entire composition has a kind of diagonal thrust to it, however, and the pathway leading between these foreground rocks and the trees leads our eye directly to the culmination of the painting, which is this pair of elderly gentlemen who are crossing yet another bridge, accompanied by a group of servants who are carrying musical instruments and looks like some lunch boxes towards this pavilion that is nestled behind a group of rocks and trees. It's typical of the kind of structure that would have been placed outside of many cities, a place where friends could go out to enjoy the landscape, to have a picnic, to view the natural world, but also as a place where one might celebrate a final cup of wine together before a friend departs on a journey. And the theme of a journey has already been introduced by the two travelers we've encountered thus far. So the artist has created a sense of drama here. We have a sense of the autumnal time of day, ebbing of the light as the evening draws near, and the ebbing of the life of these two gentlemen as, in their old age, they face one last parting as one friend prepares, perhaps, to go on a journey, the other to return to the city alone. But the Hansuel is more than just a painting. Behind the painting are mounted a series of colophons, or inscriptions. They begin in the 14th century, and which tell us about how other scholars who viewed this painting in the past have responded to this same work of art.