ART REVIEW /Holland Cotter, New York Times, September 19, 2003

The World According to Some Glorious Chinese Misfits

China Institute

A section of "A Thousand Cliffs and Myriad Valleys" (1673) by Gong Xian at the China Institute.

If you've never seen a Chinese handscroll rolled up for storage, it looks like a collapsible umbrella in a snug silk case, an expandable thing made small. You can get some sense of what expandable in this case means from a 17th-century scroll titled "A Thousand Cliffs and Myriad Valleys," on view at the China Institute Gallery.

The painting arrived in New York from China as a tight little package, but when fully unrolled, it measures 32 feet. Even when only a section of it is displayed, as in New York, you can feel the grandeur of the complete image: a continuous panorama of the Yangtze River winding through mountains. Actually, it is a dream image, fantastic, even bizarre, with its yeasty rocks as soft as rising dough and its yawning stretches of unpainted space. For the artist to have walked the equivalent of this terrain would have taken months, even years. And since that's probably how long it took him to paint the scroll, in effect, he made that trip. The Chinese call this mind-traveling, and they've always been big on it.

You can do a lot of traveling in the China Institute show, titled "Passion for the Mountains: 17th-Century Landscape Paintings From the Nanjing Museum," and even more in the complementary exhibition, "Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in 17th-Century China," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together they open art-historical vistas of exceptional breadth simply by looking hard at a patch of geography and a mere half-century of history.

The focus is on the southern city of Nanjing between the downfall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and the consolidation of the Manchu Qing dynasty a few decades later. Of the two shows, China Institute's is the more Nanjing-centric. All of its 50 scrolls, album paintings and fan paintings are on loan from the Nanjing Museum. Together they distill the verve of that cosmopolitan city, and the mood of fatalistic nostalgia that has long defined classical Chinese painting.

Nanjing was the first Ming capital, before the dynasty moved its central government north to Beijing. When Beijing fell to the invading Manchus, remnants of the court and bureaucracy fled back to Nanjing, which they maintained as a Ming stronghold for a year before surrendering it.

What many Ming officials and intellectuals did not surrender, however, was their dynastic loyalty. Bound by a Confucian code of allegiance to their original ruler, they regarded themselves as "leftover subjects," citizens of a longed-for past. Some challenged their new outlander overlords outright. Others retreated to monasteries or country estates, or took up nomadic lives.

A fair number of artists stayed in and around Nanjing, which was also called Jinling. Not only was the city a Ming emblem, it was also a cultural hot spot and an agreeably laid-back place to live. Ringed by mountains and traversed by waterways, it was physically beautiful, blessed with amenities from bookstores to brothels, with easy access to the Yellow Mountain countryside beyond.

To get a sense of what all this looked like, you can turn to a handscroll titled "Sightseeing in Jinling" by Fan Qi, one of the Eight Masters of Jinling on whom the China Institute show focuses. Its tidy depictions of well-kept neighborhoods represent a type of souvenir art with which painters who had once enjoyed government stipends supported themselves under the new dynasty.

More elite and serious styles flourished too, though in changed form. Old distinctions in status between professional court painters and amateur scholar-artists had been steadily narrowing. Literati culture, once an aesthetic avant-garde, had become the academy, its radicalism the new orthodoxy. In Nanjing, this mingling of once divergent impulses produced some worthy, if sometimes too eye-candyish, hybrid work. But the artists who look most magnetic today are the ones who made something personal of various trends that pooled up in the city and sustained a sense of art as moral instrument, a seismic device for transmitting political and spiritual moods.

One such figure was the Buddhist monk known as Kuncan. A passionate loyalist, he is represented by a stroke-tormented mountain scene, with nature dissected as much as depicted. The painting comes with a built-in perceptual twist, standard in Chinese landscapes. The viewer scanning the picture suddenly spots a single minute human figure and suddenly, with a little shock, the scale of the image is clarified and magnified.

A smoldering Romanticism seems to emanate from "A Thousand Cliffs and Myriad Valleys," painted by Gong Xian, one of the great Nanjing artists. Even with only a section displayed, it is the high point of the show, organized by Willow Weilan Hai Chang, director of China Institute Gallery. Like other art of the period, it feels at once utopian and nihilistic, projecting an ideal of natural harmony that is always in the process of vanishing, so it must be reconstituted again and again in art.

Gong Xian is a star at the Met, too, though he comes at the very end of a hefty exhibition — 60 paintings — that bristles with the voices of colleagues from Nanjing and the adjacent provinces of Anhui and Zhejiang. Maxwell K. Hearn, a curator in the museum's Asian art department, has skillfully sifted this eclectic material into regional styles. But with several artists represented in bulk, personalities tend to outshine historical narrative.

One of these personalities, the poet-painter Zhang Feng, opens the show with a group of pictures that charts changes and continuities within a career. An album of landscapes, dated 1644, offers tight, fleet riffs in the manner of Ni Zan, a "leftover subject" of an earlier dynasty, along with the image of a sunset, a motif found in other Nanjing-related painting and perhaps of Western derivation.

A hanging scroll done nearly 20 years later — its brushwork loose, parched and spare — has the image of a scholar standing on a natural stone bridge stretching over an abyss. The bridge was on Mount Tiantai, a Buddhist site, and the legend was that whoever passed over it would enter paradise. But the way across was perilously slippery, and the scholar in the scroll, venturing toward center, seems frozen in indecision, a condition familiar to artists and intellectuals torn between Ming loyalties and the increasing attractions of life under the culture-hungry Qing.

The art patron Zhou Lianggong — famed for his vast collection of contemporary painting, which he stored and exhibited on a boat — resolved the dilemma by cooperating with the Qing early on, though he ended up in jail anyway, with his art collection dispersed. A 1996 show at the China Institute reassembled a small portion of his holdings, and some of the Nanjing artists he favored are represented in an album at the Met; they include Hu Yukun, whose misty, Whistleresque landscapes charmed the cash right out of Zhou's pocket.

Finally, there are artists of such idiosyncratic force that they stand apart from everyone else. One of them, Shitao, knew every facet of the ordeal of these "leftovers." Born a Ming prince in 1642, he grew up in Buddhist monasteries and became a Chan (Chinese for Zen) master in Nanjing before shifting his spiritual commitment to Taoism. He met the Qing emperor and applied for support, without success, then settled in Yangzhou, which by the end of the century replaced Nanjing as a leading art center.

Shitao's tour-de-force early handscroll "The Sixteen Luohans" (1667) is a kind of grand Buddhist fairy tale, scrupulously painted but fizzing with youthful wit. The much later "Drunk in Autumn Woods" (circa 1702), with its giggling figures tucked away in burrowlike caves, takes an impetuous, rough-hewn approach to its vision of a tipsy, off-kilter universe. And in "36 Peaks of Yellow Mountain Recollected," from around 1705, a figure who could be the artist himself sits like a stoned-out old hippie amid swipes and spatters of ink.

The last gallery is devoted entirely to Gong Xian and amounts to a mini-survey of a fascinating artist about whom we have much still to learn, as we do about the world he was part of, which is the subject shared by the Met and China Institute shows. Those exhibitions, particularly when taken in tandem, exemplify the curatorial direction museums should be taking today, in textured, up-close historical investigations that are absorbing precisely for their depth.

This is actually standard practice in the Met's Chinese painting galleries, where the routine rotations required for conservation are often imaginatively turned into opportunities to explore complex themes and understudied material. Such is the case with "Dreams of Yellow Mountain," which consists of Met holdings and loans in equal parts. Even the most familiar Met pieces take on fresh life when placed in a new context.

China Institute doesn't have such resources to draw on and is, anyway, conceived on an altogether more intimate scale. But after years of visiting, I can report that it consistently produces some of the best Asian shows in town, with first-rate material, handsome installations and catalogs by some of the more glamorous specialists in the field. For a walk-in experience of just how big small can be, look no further.