The exhibition presents distinguished Chinese paintings from the Ching Yüan Chai Collection, which represents virtually every period of Chinese painting over the last 900 years. It showcases seventy-five hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, and album leaves from the collection of Sung, Yüan, Ming, and Ch’ing dynasties, amassed over nearly fifty years by James Cahill, preeminent scholar of Chinese art (American, 1926-2014).
Along with major figure paintings and a selection of botanical and animal subjects, the exhibition features a number of exceptional landscape paintings. Considered the highest category of painting in China, landscape painting embodies the ideals of the Confucian scholar and has inspired Chinese painting’s most daring experiments and greatest developments. The landscape paintings reveal an intimately observed living universe.
