Middlebury College displays collection of Chinese art

By Gordon Dritschillo Herald Staff

MIDDLEBURY — One scroll bears a simple picture of a section of bamboo, the leaves each rendered in a single brush stroke.

Another holds a series of intricate landscape paintings telling the tale of a woman kidnapped by nomads.

“Artists and Ancestors,” a private collection of work by Chinese artists on display at the Middlebury College Museum of the Arts, will remain on display at the museum through Sunday.

Pieces on display range from 3,000-year-old pottery to contemporary conceptual pieces. The exhibit also features the work of four of China’s great painting masters, who curator of Asian art Colin Mackenzie said were regarded in the East the way Rembrandt and Monet are in the West.

One such master is Wu Zhen, who lived from 1280 to 1354, and is recognized as one of the great masters of the Yuan Dynasty.

“In the 14th century there was a sea change in the way painting was viewed and what was considered valuable,” Mackenzie said.

Previously, there was an emphasis on detailed, realistic depictions of nature.

“But in the 14th century, there was a trend toward painters who were very well-educated, who could be poets, calligraphers,” Mackenzie said. “They might know Chinese history.”

Known as “literati painters,” they might not paint to make a living, but rather for fun.

“The emphasis was on self-expression rather than the detailed, literal depiction of an object,” he said.

One painting by Wu Zhen — the aforementioned bamboo section — seems almost simplistic in its lack of detail, until you consider the skill needed to render such large yet precise brush strokes.

“It’s like calligraphy,” Mackenzie said. “It’s built up with these wonderful, self-assured brush strokes. It gives it a sense of life. You can almost imagine the brush as it moves.”

Mackenzie said the long, single brush strokes in Wu Zhen’s and similar painting show impressive control.

“You make one mistake in a Chinese painting and it’s ruined,” he said. “You cannot make mistakes.”

Shen Zhou, a master of the Ming Dynasty. Lived from 1427 to 1509. A work of his featured in the exhibit, “Three Vegetables,” features paintings of a bamboo shoot, an eggplant and a radish along with text telling a story in which the vegetables are discussed as if they were men.

“This is a bit like a Western still life, but it’s sparer and sparser,” he said. “It’s a still life with a joke.”

The work of Tang Yin, another Ming Dynasty painter, more closely resembles the popular conception of Chinese art. One Tang Yin painting on display features a richly detailed panoramic landscape.

“This is the ideal life in China during this period,” Mackenzie said. “The scholar in his pavilion, out in the countryside … he’s looking out onto a beautiful landscape and there’s another landscape behind him.”

The painting also smoothly transitions from hard edges and sharp contours on one side to softer images on the other side.

“It’s astonishing, the technique,” Mackenzie said. “This was in the Imperial collection in the 18th and 19th centuries.”

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a long scroll painting by Qiu Ying, also from the Ming Dynasty. The scroll holds a long series of landscape paintings that depict the story of a woman named Wenji, a musician and poetess kidnapped by nomads in the 3rd century.

The panels show her capture and subsequent life among the nomads as the wife of their chief. The space between the panels holds portions of “Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute,” a poem on Wenji’s life often attributed to her, making the scroll something of an early graphic novel.

Mackenzie said scrolls were often viewed section by section, but the Qiu Ying work is unfurled in a massive display case.

“This must be one of the longest scroll cases ever built in the U.S.,” Mackenzie said. “It’s 44 feet long. We were determined we were going to show the entire scroll and the only way we could get it in the room was to put it in diagonally.”

A pair of modern Chinese pieces in the exhibit look, at first glance, like simple assemblies of Chinese text. On closer inspection, the viewer sees English words that have been made to look like Chinese characters. Writings of Chairman Mao and a Walt Whitman poem receive this treatment.

“People just fall in love with these things,” Mackenzie said.

Contact Gordon Dritschilo at gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com.