Explore the innovative landscape work of one of China’s most renowned contemporary artists.
This is the third of four volumes from a 1921 edition of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. This particular page opening illustrates the method for painting figures at the water’s edge, watching clouds rise. The manual has also been popular outside China. The manuscript annotations in red on this volume are in Japanese, and identify the line of text as part of a poem by the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) poet and painter Wang Wei (AD 699–759). Xu Bing’s scroll reproduces only half the text given here, and turns the figures to face the opposite direction.
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. 87 on p. 170, p. 151, illus. p. 170 fig. 87
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