Among the visual arts of Asia, the painting of imperial China is debatably the most accomplished and the most artistically satisfying. Most examples of this eloquent art, however, have been locked away in politically isolated China for several decades - sheltered in old Bei-jing's Forbidden City, the palace of the emperors of China for five centuries.
This vast Imperial Palace, a museum since 1925, counts among its greatest treasures a large group of paintings from the last imperial dynasties: the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (pronounced "Ching," 1644-1911).With the widening exchange of ideas between China and the West, many precious elements of Chinese civilization have made their first outside appearances in the United States. A fine example is the exhibition "Masterworks of Ming and Qing: Painting from the Forbidden City." Having been at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the show has appeared at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
The pieces include 76 works on paper and silk selected from the 9,000 works held by the Palace Museum. These hanging scrolls, handscrolls and album leaves were painted in both colors and ink by professional and court painters as well as Buddhist monks, hermits and scholar-amateurs.
The hanging scroll is Asia's equivalent of the West's easel painting and is probably unique to East Asia: a rolled silk or paper surface that can be unfurled horizontally as the viewer "reads" its unfolding and continuous imagery.
The album format is reminiscent of a Western picture book, a succession of pages often interrelated in subject and design. The landscapes, flowers, animals and figures are rendered in styles representing several distinctive schools and periods.
Chinese artists, like those of the European Renaissance, were part of an elaborate hierarchy. Some fought to succeed in the highly competitive court, while others were reclusive and tried to avoid the intrigues of the lords and ladies.
All of them, however, used the subjects and techniques of various masters of earlier days, whom they revered.
Some formed schools, such as the Zhe School. The members usually made large pictures for great homes and imperial offices, using vivid contrasts of ink tones and strong, bold brushwork to emphasize dramatic expression and action. The far more restrained manner of the Wu School became dominant when the dynasty collapsed and the patrons and professionals of the Zhe School were displaced.
Many artists of the Wu were wealthy gentlemen and scholars who fancied poetry and had the leisure to devote themselves to the arts. They were part of an elite that had mastered the fine art of Chinese writing - a calligraphy with thousands of subtle ideograms whose execution in ink on paper required a brilliant skill with the brush.
The styles of representational painting gradually evolved from the techniques of calligraphy.
Of the paintings of the Zhe school in the exhibition, "Arising Dragon" by the early 16th-century professional artist Wang Zhao is one of the most exceptional. A work created with strong, moving brushwork on silk, it depicts the flight of a dragon arising from its winter's sleep and sweeping over the heads of an amazed scholar and his attendant. This kind of large scroll was intended to hang in palaces and aristocratic households.