Autumn landscape with egrets and ducks

Lü Ji

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lü Ji, a professional painter from Zhejiang Province, worked in the Southern Song (1127–1279) ink-wash style, which had remained popular in that region through the intervening centuries. He was summoned to be a court painter in the Hongzhi period (1488–1505) and was given an honorary title as an officer in the imperial guard. The artist's paintings, done in a dashing descriptive style that was highly regarded at court, were derided by Shen Zhou (1427–1509), the leading scholar-painter of the time, as being merely works "of the hand"; Shen considered his own calligraphic drawings to be products "of the heart." The contrast between the hand and the heart highlights the presumed difference between the works of the "professional" artists and those of the "scholar-amateur" painters of the Ming period.

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