Viewing a waterfall from a mountain pavilion

Li Yin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Li Yin was a professional painter from Yangzhou, a commercial city located on the Grand Canal just north of the Yangzi River in Jiangsu Province. During the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Yangzhou’s prosperity supported a number of artists. Li, together with his better-known contemporary Yuan Jiang (act. 1680–1730), worked in a studio of painters that specialized in intricately described visions of palatial architecture set within sumptuous blue-and-green landscapes. In reviving the monumental landscape style of the Tang and Song dynasties, Li Yin and Yuan Jiang also catered to a taste for large-scale hanging scrolls and multipanel screen paintings to decorate the ostentatious mansions of Yangzhou’s mercantile elite.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art