Five poems

Shitao (Zhu Ruoji)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Shitao's versatility as a painter is matched by his broad command of ancient script types and individual earlier masters' writing styles. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who wrote in only one or two scripts, Shitao freely varied the script type, style, and scale of his writing to suit format and content. In this fan Shitao emulates the archaic regular script of Zhong You (151–230) in the first part of his text (right half) and Zhong's follower, the fourteenth-century recluse-artist Ni Zan (1306–1374) in the second part (left half). The unmodulated brushstrokes and rectilinear forms convey an air of simplicity and purity well suited to Shitao's poems, which describe his lifelong devotion to poetry, painting, and calligraphy inspite of often straitened circumstances.

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