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The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
at 82nd Street
212-535-7710
New York
Galleries for Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy
Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717)
September 9, 2008-
January 4, 2009

Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) traces Wang’s artistic development — from his early years as a brilliant reinterpreter of classic landscape styles to the pinnacle of his career, when he was chosen to illustrate the Kangxi Emperor’s epic 1689 inspection tour of China’s cultural heartland — through 27 paintings drawn from the Taipei and Beijing Palace Museums, Shanghai Museum, and several North American collections. The presentation of Wang Hui’s career will incorporate 11 works that have never before been exhibited in the West, including two enormous panoramic landscape handscrolls. Wang’s paintings will be complemented by a selection of earlier landscapes, drawn largely from the Metropolitan Museum’s holdings, that will highlight the sources of Wang Hui’s inspiration.

The exhibition is organized in four chronological sections.

Emulating the Ancients: The Formative Years, 1660-1670 traces the artist’s tutelage under the prominent painters Wang Jian (1598-1677) and Wang Shimin (1592-1680). They introduced him to the styles of the ancient masters and helped him gain access to many of the finest private collections in the region. Wang Hui’s mastery of the idioms of 14th-century scholar painters such as Wang Meng (1308-1385) is demonstrated by his Reading Next to the Window in the Mountains (dated 1666, The Palace Museum, Beijing). Here, Wang Hui has animated his composition through a combination of dense, energized brushwork and dynamically pulsating landscape elements.

Copying the Old Masters. Wang’s facility in emulating earlier styles will be featured in this section. Commissioned by collectors, he produced a number of exact copies of ancient masterpieces. In them, the artist’s authorship is revealed — even in the most faithful ones — by his expressive brushwork and kinesthetically charged compositions. Some of the copies, however, were mistakenly catalogued as originals when they entered the imperial collection.

The Great Synthesis, 1670-1680. How the artist systematically expanded his repertoire of ancient styles in order to achieve a “great synthesis” is the main topic of this section. This is the period when Wang began to explore the potential of the infinitely expandable handscroll format. The Colors of Mount Taihang of 1669 is one of his earliest essays at reviving the monumental style of the 10th and 11th centuries. In it, Wang successfully reconfigures the towering vertical mountains of the 10th-century master Guan Tong into the horizontal format through the use of thrusting mountain forms and vigorous brushwork that powerfully convey the tectonic forces of nature.

Streams and Mountains Without End, 1680-1700. The final section of the exhibition will document Wang’s emergence as the preeminent landscapist of his day. One of the defining features of his national reputation was his singular skill at creating vast panoramic landscape compositions in the handscroll format. When the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722) began to make plans for a tour of the economic and cultural centers of the Yangzi Delta region of “Southern” China in 1684, Wang was already campaigning actively for a chance to create a pictorial record of the journey. Shortly before the emperor embarked on his tour, Wang painted Layered Rivers and Tiered Peaks (dated 1684, Shanghai Museum) for an influential court official; he clearly intended the 61-foot-long handscroll to be an example of his ability to document a monumental journey. In 1691 Wang’s persistence was rewarded, and he was summoned to Beijing to create a pictorial document of Kangxi’s second inspection tour of 1689 — the grandest artistic commission of the age. After working on the piece for seven years, Wang, with his assistants, finally completed a mammoth 12-scroll work (measuring over 740 feet in length) entitled the Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour in 1698. Of the 12 scrolls, the exhibition will present Scroll Three (Metropolitan Museum), depicting the emperor’s journey through the mountainous terrain of Shandong Province to Mount Tai, and Scroll Seven (University of Alberta, Canada), which follows the Grand Canal through China’s “land of fish and rice,” from the city of Wuxi to the great commercial and cultural metropolis of Suzhou.

Upon completion of the piece, Wang was granted an audience with the emperor and was rewarded with the calligraphic encomium of “landscapes clear and radiant.” He hung it in his studio and thenceforth called himself “Master of the Clear and Radiant Hall.”

Edited by Curator Maxwell K. Hearn, Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) offers the first comprehensive study of the artist’s career published in English. It features essays by three leading scholars that examine: the nature of his artistic achievement (Wen C. Fong, Edwards S. Sanford Professor (ret.), Princeton University, and retired chairman of the Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); Wang Hui’s life and artistic development leading up to his selection for the Southern Tour project (Dr. Chin-Sung Chang, Associate Professor, Seoul National University); and his masterpiece, the Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (Maxwell K. Hearn).