Wangchuan Villa

Unidentified artist

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The eighth-century poet and painter Wang Wei was so taken with the beauty of his country estate that he decided to celebrate it with a cycle of twenty poems extolling various sites on the property and a painted handscroll that depicted the grounds. The poems have been part of the core curriculum for students of Chinese literature for a millennium, and although the original painting was lost long ago, its composition has survived in the form of rubbings and painted copies. This example merges the naive architectural forms of the original composition with the elegant painterly sensibility of the sixteenth-century followers of Wen Zhengming (1470–1559).

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