Landscapes and trees

Gong Xian

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the mid-1670s Gong Xian’s confidence as a painter had taught him to avoid an overly skillful or popular style. He wrote: “Nowadays when people paint they do only what appeals to the common eye; I alone do not seek to please the present.” In this album, both paintings and inscriptions attest to Gong’s striving after a spiritual communion with earlier masters while creating a pictorial vocabulary all his own. Departing from his densely textured, monumental landscape style of the 1660s, Gong moved toward a sparser manner in which each brushstroke is made to function calligraphically as well as descriptively, embodying both expressive and representational meaning. The album’s format—paintings accompanied by art-historical comments—reminds us that Gong Xian taught painting for a living.

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