Chinese Sages

Kano Sanraku

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This pair of screens portrays well-known but seldom pictorialized stories. At right is Huang Chuping, a shepherd who gained the ability to transform stones into sheep. Flanked by his skeptical brother and a young attendant, Chuping fixes his gaze on a bright white rock in the bottom of the third panel, where a smudge of ink suggests an impending transformation. At left is a pair of recluses. Xu You, disquieted after declining an offer to take over the empire, rushes to wash his ears in a spring. Chaofu decides that the spring is now too polluted to water his bull. The screens are a masterwork of the so-called gyō, or “running,” style of ink painting. With origins in Southern Song Chinese painting, it is one of three styles assimilated by medieval Japanese artists and transformed by early Kano school painters, especially Kano Motonobu and his grandson Eitoku (1543–1590).

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