Enjoy the summery scenes on fan paintings from the Chinese and Japanese reserve collection.
Lu Zhi, also known as Shuping or Baoshan, was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu province. He was admired in his lifetime for his bird-and-flower painting, though today his landscapes in the style of Song court painting are equally appreciated. Like his friend Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), the illustrious literati painter, Lu Zhi was good at poems. The inscribed poem composed by him reads: ‘[I] used to be a piece of jade on top of a hairpin, [but] now [I] am a flower on top of a branch; [I] feel sad in the night of bright moon, [as I want] to fly back home’. The flower here embodies the feelings of a homesick girl, who sees the jade on her hairpin as a sign of home.
Vainker, Shelagh, Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2000), no. 84 on p. 104, illus. p. 105 fig. 84
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