Outward bound and inward bound are the yin and yang of Chinese landscape painting. Movement is the modus operandi in an art that takes us hiking up mountains and cruising down streams, but always in a spirit of rumination. This is action painting as thinking.
“Journeys: Mapping the Earth and Mind in Chinese Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is about movement on many levels, one utterly practical. Every six months or so all the paintings in the Met’s Chinese galleries are taken off display and returned to storage, and others are moved in to replace them. Prolonged exposure to light would cause the inks used in this fundamentally calligraphic work to fade over time….[Full Text]