Landscape and Couplet of Chinese Verse

Landscape and Couplet of Chinese Verse

Ike Taiga

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ike Taiga juxtaposes a landscape of towering mountains of an almost impossible steepness with a four-line poem by the Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai, celebrating the spirit of solitude found within unspoiled nature. A pathway leads from close to the lower margin into the center of the composition and draws the viewer into the pictorial space. It seems to invite us to imagine ourselves in the place of the lonely wanderer shown in the center of the image. The man is likely meant to be the poet himself, since the walking pole is an iconographic convention for representing Li Bai. The poem reads: The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. —Trans. Sam Hamill

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Landscape and Couplet of Chinese VerseLandscape and Couplet of Chinese VerseLandscape and Couplet of Chinese VerseLandscape and Couplet of Chinese VerseLandscape and Couplet of Chinese Verse

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.