Yang Guifei Playing a Flute

Yang Guifei Playing a Flute

Kano Tsunenobu

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Academic painters in the Edo period also sought to represent beauties in their paintings, but drew on a continental figure painting tradition instead of using the demimond directly as their subject. Yang Guifei, ill-fated concubine of the Tang emperor at the time of the An Lushan rebellion and most likely first known through a poem by Bai Luodian (772–846), was a metaphor for womanly beauty from very early times. There are references to her in the eleventh-century Tale of Genji [Genji Monogatari] and in the slightly earlier Pillow Book [Makura sōshi]. By the seventeenth century, her perosnification of fleshly beauty was so pervasive it was used to sell skin-whitening cream, a product described in a short vignette in The Mirror of Townsmen in our Land [Honcho chōnin kagami], a collection of merchant tales written by the novelist Saikaku (1642–1693) and published a year after his death.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yang Guifei Playing a FluteYang Guifei Playing a FluteYang Guifei Playing a FluteYang Guifei Playing a FluteYang Guifei Playing a Flute

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.