Drunken recluse beneath an old tree

Drunken recluse beneath an old tree

Chen Zihe

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the end of the fifteenth century the court had ceased to be the principal patron of the arts, so professional painters turned to private sponsors and to the marketplace as outlets for their work, adopting a bravura style of execution that transformed painting into a kind of performance art. Using an idiom of bold monochrome brushwork and graded ink washes first employed by Chan (Zen) Buddhist monk-artists during the thirteenth century, these artists made compositions with dazzling virtuosity, often before astonished onlookers. The Fukinese painter Chen Zihe was a significant regional master in this tradition who took the sobriquet "Uninhibited Immortal" to emphasize his rejection of convention. Chen's humorous and somewhat provocative image of a drunken immortal exhibits all the key conventions of his craft. The shallow picture space and tight composition are constructed of powerful diagonals that intensify the dramatic focus, while highly animated brushwork offers a lively counterpoint to the massive scale of the pictorial elements, many of which are truncated by the frame.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Drunken recluse beneath an old treeDrunken recluse beneath an old treeDrunken recluse beneath an old treeDrunken recluse beneath an old treeDrunken recluse beneath an old tree

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.