Explore the innovative landscape work of one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists.
This is the 18th of 23 volumes, probably from a reprint of the 1812-1817 Japanese edition of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. This particular opening illustrates the method for painting figures. The small figure of a servant boy – identifiable by his hairstyle of twin topknots – hides amongst trees in Xu Bing’s The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll [LI2007.77]. Most of the figures in the scroll in fact appear in groups.
Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 28 February-19 May 2013, Xu Bing Landscape/Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing, Shelagh Vainker, ed. (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2013), no. 84 on p. 167, p. 151, illus. p. 167 fig. 84
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