Where are the Landscapes?

From the beginning of last autumn, Taipei offered delights enough to turn art lovers around the world green with envy--two exhibitions whose juxtaposition has been described as "the meeting of the century." They were a rare treat, and prompted much discussion of Chinese and Western painting, and of museums getting involved in overseas exchanges.

（left） The thousand-year-old silk scroll Travellers Among Mountain and Streams became the focus of a controversy about national treasures going overseas. It has now been decided that the work is too rare to travel. （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）

In mid-January, the doors finally closed on the visiting Louvre exhibition "The Landscape in Western Paintings of the 16th to 19th Centuries," which had attracted a record 730,000 visitors. The National Palace Museum's special exhibition "70 Restricted Works of Outstanding Calligraphy and Painting," came to an end slightly earlier; 19 Song and Yuan dynasty works from the exhibition are now due to go on an exhibition tour of the USA, along with more than 400 other national treasures.

（right） The Louvre's greatest treasure, the Mona Lisa, is 500 years old. It too is not lightly lent out for exhibition elsewhere.

What questions does this meeting of Eastern and Western classical paintings raise, and what thoughts does it prompt? What difficulties or obstacles do local people in Taiwan face when appreciating Western and Chinese landscapes? Sinorama interviewed painter Chiang Hsun, a historian of Chinese and Western art who recorded the audio guides for both exhibitions.

（left） "The Yellow River's waters come from Heaven"? A landscape by Qing-dynasty artist Shi Tao. （courtesy of Fu Shen）

Alongside the interview, in "In Focus," we also present a selection of excerpts from reports and commentaries on the controversy which has blown up over whether it is appropriate for restricted-dis-play art works to travel overseas.

Q: You were responsible for producing the audio guides both for the Louvre exhibition and for the exhibition of calligraphy and paintings from the National Palace Museum collection. In the short space of a few dozen minutes, what insights and feelings did you hope to arouse in ordinary members of the public who may have had little opportunity to see famous Chinese and Western works of art in the original?

A: What you can do in an audio guide is very limited--all you can do is help the people looking at the paintings to overcome their initial sense of unfamiliarity, and tell them some of the background to the work of art.

Seeing is more important than understanding

Many people worry that they "won't understand" what they see at an exhibition. But what do we mean by understanding a painting? Take the work Roger Rescuing Angelica, by the 19th-century French artist Ingres, in the Louvre exhibition. The audio guide tells you the mythological story behind the painting, and you seem to understand. But someone who knows nothing of the story will still be captivated by the shining golden suit of armor, the incredibly fine detail of the feathers of Roger's winged steed, and the silky skin of the beautiful girl.

After you listen to the information on the audio guide, it's best to forget it again. In fact, when people who "know all about" art get caught up with this school or that -ism, they aren't necessarily at ease looking at art. The philosophy of Zhuangzi (c. 369-286 BC) talks about "forgetting"--knowledge should not become a burden, and one should be able to return to a child-like state of mind.

It should be no different from when we see some lovely scenery, and are moved to say "Oh, how gorgeous!"--that's all. Sometimes seeing is more important than understanding.

When I was doing the audio guide, I hoped to use the sound of my voice to make people feel calm. Apart from imparting knowledge, I also wanted to infect their mood, to slow down the speed and rhythm at which they look at the paintings. To get into Chinese landscape paintings especially, you need a leisurely, carefree attitude, a kind of rather aloof drifting. If the visitor is short of time, I would rather he or she just looked at one painting this time than looking at lots of them in a rush, and not getting a lasting impression of any of them.

Our greatest treasures outshone?

People today stress efficiency and doing a certain thing within a certain amount of time, and they insist on getting something from it. With this kind of attitude, the moment someone becomes anxious, they might not see anything at all. It's just like when the cherry trees come into flower. If you battle your way through the crowds to go up Yangmingshan and look at the blossoms, in the end all you see is people. Everyone complains that they didn't see the cherry blossoms, and moans about the crowds and the traffic jams. Actually you don't need to go there for the cherry blossoms. If you go up Yangmingshan and just walk around, it's rather nice up there.

The idea of striving for success and material gain is just the opposite of the philosophy behind Chinese landscape paintings. It's only when you have no relationship of gain with them that you can see them clearly. But this isn't something the audio guide can do for you.

Q: Just like the exhibitions in Taiwan last year of Monet, Rodin and other famous Western artists, from the first day the Louvre exhibition opened it drew enormous crowds of visitors, with long queues of people waiting to get in. By comparison, the National Palace Museum's unprecedented exhibition of restricted-display works wasn't nearly so popular. Some people say that as a visitor from afar, the Louvre exhibition has naturally aroused people's curiosity. Others lament that the National Palace Museum's greatest treasures are no match for second-fiddle paintings from the Louvre. How do you see this phenomenon?

A: There isn't a major museum in the world which will lightly loan out its greatest treasures for exhibition elsewhere. Take the Louvre's Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo--if the countless tourists from all over the world who go to Paris couldn't see them there, they would be angry with the French.

Visitor numbers decided by the media

I think the fact that the Louvre exhibition has drawn such large crowds actually has a lot to do with the media publicity. The organizers spent NT$140 million (US$5.3m) to bring the exhibition from the Louvre, so naturally they wanted to attract as many people as possible. They gave it enough publicity, and with a newspaper group among the backers you could say it got blanket coverage. By comparison the Palace exhibition got far less publicity.

I'm sure that if the "Restricted Works" exhibition were to be put on again after all the headlines about national treasures being sent overseas, there would be long queues outside it too. Now even taxi drivers are talking about Fan Kuan's Travellers Among Mountain and Streams. I've been teaching for 18 years, but I've had less influence than a few days of news reports.

At the "Restricted Works" exhibition we could see group after group of Japanese tourists, all kitted out with binoculars or galleryscopes. This is partly because long in advance, Japan Asia Airways and travel agents started advertising the exhibition in a big way: Everyone be sure to go to Taiwan this month, because the best Song and Yuan dynasty paintings in the world will all be on display!

Q: Outside the Louvre exhibition I interviewed a lot of young people, some of whom had come all the way from central or southern Taiwan. Except for complaining about how crowded the exhibition was, most of them thought it was "very good," and "well worth coming." I asked if they had also visited the National Palace Museum's "Restricted Works" exhibition. The reasons given by the many who said they did not plan to go were mostly on the lines of "I wouldn't understand it anyway," or "They all look the same." I've heard that the exhibition at the Palace Museum in Beijing of 70 outstanding calligraphy and painting works has also been "sparsely visited." Are Western oil landscapes really easier to appreciate than Chinese paintings and calligraphy?

Did we really see "landscapes"?

A: Although the Louvre exhibition's theme is "the landscape," most of the 71 works chosen for it are historical or religious paintings which fall within two great traditions of Western culture: they portray either Greek and Roman myths and history, or biblical scenes. For a Taiwanese audience with a Chinese cultural background, and probably unfamiliar with the roots of Western culture, I'm afraid there are still many problems even if one tries to reduce the difficulty of interpretation by simply presenting the works as "landscapes."

Of course, the Western paintings in this exhibition are closer to descriptions of phenomena. They have stories and characters, and they also have rich colors and definite forms, so most people may feel they are easier to immediately accept. By the Song dynasty, Chinese landscape paintings became a kind of philosophy, and even did away with colors. Someone with no experience of appreciating ink wash paintings is almost certain to feel distant from them.

Buddhism says that color (external appearance) is void. From the perspective of the concept of gaining knowledge by observation, as advocated by the Song dynasty School of Laws in Chinese philosophy, if you observe a flower you will see that the petals are red and the leaves are green, but if you keep on watching it from when the buds burst to when the leaves wither, you will see that it is changing all the time. It is in the nature of the flower to fade and wither, but "fallen flowers are not unfeeling, for they turn to Spring earth and protect [the next generation of] flowers." Thus people of the Song discovered flowers' continued existence after death, and the illusory nature of color. This is why in Song art we see bamboos painted in black ink. The bamboos' green color exists only briefly, so painting them in ink became an artistic metaphor: the artist was capturing a concept, not external form, so its nature was more pure. Ink wash paintings were elevated to the level of philosophical enquiry, and became less accessible for ordinary people.

Food for thought

Another major and basic reason why visitors don't find it easy to appreciate Chinese landscape paintings may be our environment. The content and pace of our life today are faster, but the Song painters observed their natural surroundings very quietly and calmly, and this state of mind may be something that modern city dwellers have lost altogether. Artists like Fan Kuan, Guo Xi and Li Tang really lived in the midst of the landscapes they painted. If your life has the same content, it is more likely to have a similar pace and order, and you will be more able to enter their world.

Q: What you say reminds one of the Western art historian E.H. Gonbrich's words: "Devout [Chinese] artists began to paint water and mountains in a spirit of reverence, not in order to teach any particular lesson, nor merely as decorations, but to provide material for deep thought. Their pictures on silk scrolls were kept in precious containers and only unrolled in quiet moments, to be looked at and pondered over. . . ." He says it is not easy for "fidgety Westerners" to recapture the mood behind the paintings. Based on Gonbrich's view, can't we surmise that today's urban Taiwanese are no better equipped to appreciate Chinese paintings than "fidgety Westerners"? And isn't the museum, with its milling crowds, a completely unsuitable place to quietly savor Chinese landscapes?

A: I agree. Western painting has a tradition of academy and salon exhibitions, and the paintings shown were intended to be hung on a wall and criticized, while religious murals were painted on the walls of churches to edify and be seen by large numbers of believers. Our museums basically follow the Western model, and perhaps they are really not suitable places for appreciating Chinese paintings. This is particularly striking in the case of handscrolls.

Indecent exposure?

Handscrolls would originally have been enjoyed by a small group of good friends, slowly furling along the length of the scroll under a lamp. If you see the whole scroll completely opened out, the process of surprise and suspense is quite missing. When the whole of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains [by Huang Gongwang (1269-1354) of the Yuan dynasty] is rolled out on display, it's as if a shy Chinese beauty were suddenly standing stark naked in front of you--you'd just feel sorry for her.

Q: We keep saying that Chinese landscape paintings are in the realm of mature philosophy, and some Western art historians also believe Song dynasty paintings represent one of the highest points which human culture has aspired to. Why? If the 12th-century Song dynasty was the high point, does this mean that for the last 800 years we have been going downhill?

A: From the Tang (618-907) to the Song (960-1279), Chinese painting made many astonishing advances. Today when we speak of the paintings of Northern Song (960-1127), we think of the classic landscapes of Fan Kuan, Guo Xi and Li Tang, with their vertical central axes and boundless vistas. But actually there was tremendous diversity in Northern Song painting styles. The Northern Song took the figure paintings, bird-and-flower paintings and blue-and-green landscapes of the Tang dynasty and brought each of them to new heights. They made the transition from the rich colors of palace ornament to the world of literati paintings.

The role played in this process by the Song emperor Huizong (ruled 1101-1125) was crucial. He established a department of drawing and painting in the Imperial Academy, which we can say was the world's first fine arts department in a state-run university, and which elevated painting from the status of a craft to an activity for educated people. His Xuanhe Art Academy was the world's first national museum or ministry of culture; it held examinations and provided training for artists, and supported them financially. Huizong compiled the Xuanhe catalogues of calligraphy and painting, which can be described as the world's earliest museum catalogues. From then on, even those emperors who were not artistically inclined still had to make a show of being cultured, and treat collecting works of art as an important matter of state.

Which foot does the peacock lift first?

The system which Emperor Huizong instituted for recruiting court artists, by setting topics for art exams in the form of a line of poetry, was also an extraordinary reform. In Song dynasty records we can see such exam topics, personally selected [from ancient poetry] by this extremely cultivated emperor, as: "Deep in the mountains, whence sounds the bell?" "The returning steed's hooves are sweet with flowers' fragrance," or "A deserted rustic crossing, the ferry lies alone on the water." Such topics lift the sense of vision to a higher plane, and demand that the artist attempt to translate hearing, smell and mood into visual terms.

We know that the Song court venerated Neo- Confucianism, and the Neo-Confucianist School of Laws advocated gaining knowledge by observation, which meant studying and observing everything in nature without preconceptions. This spirit of enquiry helped bird-and-flower painting develop to extraordinary levels of skill. Some artists spent their whole lives painting just one kind of bird, observing every aspect of its life in minute detail, from its gait and flight to how it laid its eggs. Books of the time on painting theory record how people even put on all kinds of competitions, and debated such questions as whether a peacock walking on the ground first lifts its right foot or its left. This reveals the depth of their observation and the heights of their skill. By his imperial authority, Huizong reformed the examination system and transformed what had been manual skills into concepts, literature and even philosophy. The Song painters who emerged from then on were all great scholars and thinkers.

Landscape paintings were also a product of the spirit of observation. They were produced by tranquil observation of the vastness of the universe and of the natural world, and were at an even greater level of difficulty. The "wrinkle" technique [the technique of showing the shades and texture of rocks and mountains by light ink strokes] developed by the landscape artists of the time represents neither earth nor rock, but something more fundamental. In the West, concepts like these were first developed by C憴anne in the 19th century.

The spirit, style and technique of Northern Song art achieved a perfect balance. From then on the literati landscapes acquired such a dominance that they became the mainstream of Chinese painting. Later, Yuan dynasty landscape painters also achieved great things. From the Ming dynasty onwards, the fashion for imitating the works of earlier ages became very entrenched, and art got into a rut. That went for the academies, but outside them there was still a rich vitality, and [disaffected] artists like Xu Wei, Shi Tao and Zhu Da were all original and innovative, very subversive, very modern. It's just that in the "establishment" Imperial Palace collection, it's not so easy to see their works.

Mankind dwarfed by nature

Q: You believe the philosophical nature of Chinese landscape paintings is in harmony with the soul of modern painting in the West since C憴anne. In these two exhibitions, we see Chinese ink wash paintings--mainly Song landscapes--at the same time as pre-modernist Western classical landscapes. What issues does this juxtaposition raise?

A: The Louvre exhibition's title refers to landscapes, but in fact the paintings all depict people. This prompts a very interesting thought: when Westerners speak of landscape paintings, the concept they have in mind is quite different from ours, and when considering human beings' relationship with nature, they also have a quite different comprehension of life. In Greek and Roman mythology, the sun is Apollo, the goddess of the moon is Diana, and everything in nature has a human form, so when they think of nature, they associate it with human images. In the Bible, God fashioned Adam and Eve from the dust of the ground, and all Creation exists for the sake of man.

In Chinese mythology, on the other hand, after Pangu separated Heaven and Earth, he lay down and one of his eyes became the sun while the other became the moon. The land we see today is Pangu--the rivers are his veins and arteries, the mountains and rocks are his bones, and the contours of the land are human vital energy. In fact, this is all about cycles of renewal. When the flowers become "Spring earth" and protect the new flowers, or when flesh and bone decay to become life energy, they initiate the next cycle of life. Therefore the universe, the mountains and rivers in Chinese landscape paintings represent the eternal, as expressed in Zhuangzi's words: "Other than life and death, there is no end or beginning." Humans' own bodies have become the life energy of the mountains and rivers.

The Taoists looked at man from the standpoint of nature: man modelled himself on the Earth, the Earth modelled itself on Heaven, Heaven modelled itself on the Tao, and the Tao modelled itself on nature--nature was the highest force of life and creativity. The Confucianists said: "The four seasons turn, all living things bring forth new issue, yet Heaven speaks not." It was not possible for man to step beyond nature's great creative power, and an individual's life had to blend into and be in harmony with the life of nature, not stand in opposition to nature or attempt to conquer it. This view of the comparative importance of man and nature meant that such human figures as appear in Chinese landscape paintings are always very small.

A counter to aristocratic tastes

In Western paintings, human figures in nature often appear in the pose of conquerors. In one painting in the Louvre exhibition, Louis XIV appears on horseback, pointing at the ground as if to say: "This is the land I have conquered!" His gardens also have to be trimmed into whatever shapes he desires, and this too is a subjugation of nature. Chinese and Western aesthetic attitudes are very different.

It has recently occurred to me that the rise of the Chinese landscape actually came in part from resistance to the possessive culture of the aristocracy, to encourage the court and nobles to repent of their desire to conquer. If you conquer, then what? This is the spirit of the literati paintings. When the literati suffered on account of politics, they began to realize the high-handed nature of aristocratic political life. This social class--the literati--doesn't seem to have existed in the West. In the Enlightenment movement, Rousseau wanted to return to nature, but a huge class of literati as in China did not come into being. In China, from Wang Wei of the Tang dynasty to the Song and especially the Yuan, landscape paintings were basically a form of resistance to the court. We can say that paintings such as Liu Guandao's Kublai Khan Hunting represented the establishment position, but those of Huang Gongwang certainly did not. The literati paintings in fact presented a kind of "unofficial viewpoint."

Q: You are saying that actually most of the pictures we see in the National Palace Museum are anti-establishment?

A: You could say so. For instance, the [Qing] emperor Qianlong in fact very much appreciated Western style, so he liked Giuseppe Castiglione and he liked the Old Summer Palace [an imperial retreat in northern Beijing built from 1709 onwards in a mixture of Chinese and Western styles and destroyed in 1860 by the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force]. He always told the Western artists whom he gathered about him to paint battle and hunting scenes, and his favorite dogs and horses, because the Chinese landscape painting is not a suitable medium for eulogizing human achievement.

It is quite remarkable that so early in our culture there was something so transcendent. From Fan Kuan, Guo Xi and Li Tang to Huang Gongwang, they were all celebrating nature, not conquest, power or rank. Landscape paintings were actually subverting these things.

First a rebel, then a filial child

In this respect the Song emperors were remarkable. We always think of the Song emperors as weak and ineffectual, but they brought culture to its peak. If today we can appreciate the pure and clean lines of Ru porcelain ware, and if we find it hard to comprehend the gaudy ornamentation of King Louis' palaces, this is our legacy from Song culture. Under the influence of the literati spirit established by Huizong back in the Song, as a Manchu emperor Qianlong had no choice but to continue this national tradition by collecting paintings from many sources and constantly being seen appreciating them, to prove he was a man of cultivated tastes.

Q: One art historian has written that growing up in the 1950s, she used to think of Chinese landscape paintings as something as outdated as opium and bound feet. You too once mentioned that you were moved by Western painting in your youth, and it was only later that you gradually came to appreciate the beauty of Chinese traditional landscapes. Is the ability to appreciate Chinese landscape paintings really closely connected to a person's age?

A: That's right, when we were young we read Culture Star magazine along with everyone else. At the time it was very avant-garde. It advocated modern paintings, modern poetry and modern music. In those days the "Orient" and "May" art societies debated modern Chinese ink wash paintings, and Hsu Chang-hui went to Paris to study atonal music, and came back and did modern Chinese folk songs with Shih Wei-liang. At the time many people said these people were rebels who had lost their way in Western culture. But [poet] Yu Kuang-chung said something very interesting--he said you first have to be a rebel before you can be a filial child. At the time I didn't really understand, but now, looking back, in fact they were very traditional. The modernism which Culture Star promoted connects very well with the spirit of the Song paintings in the National Palace Museum. They went by a very roundabout route to once again catch sight of the traditional spirit. Take the Cloud Gate Dance Theater: it's not all Martha Graham. Since [Cloud Gate founder] Lin Huai-min returned from New York, from The Tale of the White Serpent to Legacy, all his pieces have been extremely traditional.

The eye of experience

When I was younger I didn't like to go to the National Palace Museum either. I felt it was very stuffy, and the things in it seemed to have nothing to do with me. Western art, on the other hand, was very powerful. Van Gogh's burning enthusiasm could immediately touch a young person's heart. But when you have lived and experienced death around you, you begin to see what the Chinese paintings are trying to express. You realize what they are talking about. Western artists tend to reach the peak of their creative career in their 40s, when they are in the prime of life. But Huang Gongwang's brilliant Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains was painted when he was in his 80s, and is a synthesis of his mood and life experience. Chinese artists' best works usually didn't appear until they were over 70. So I never insist on young students trying to understand them.

Q: Reestablishing the link with tradition by way of Western Modernism--that's a very interesting interpretation. Do the paintings of San Yu, recently exhibited at the National Museum of History, also reveal this quality? And just what is the link between C憴anne and the spirit of Song paintings?

A: Following the invention of photography in the 1850s, painters in the West had to search for a new meaning for their work other than imitating nature. After looking at the scenery of the South of France for 20 years, Paul C憴anne, the father of Modernism, said that he could not reproduce the mountains he saw before his eyes, but could only seek out a few basic elements, and use color, brushstrokes and form to reconstitute them. This is completely the concept behind Song paintings and their wrinkle technique. So today's Western Modernist artists actually understand Chinese art very well. Since the Fauvists they have basically no longer tried to reproduce external appearance, but have attempted, through things' outer appearance, to understand their inner nature. So when Western Minimalists see white porcelain from the Song dynasty Ding kiln, they are sure to understand it.

San Yu studied in Paris in the 1920s, and was deeply influenced by the Western Fauvists. But nonetheless what he painted was purely Chinese in spirit. I feel he is the modern painter who best understands Song art. What I mean by Song art here is not necessarily just landscapes, but also the overall spirit of Song art, including embroidery and crafts. It is also the spirit of the China of the 1930s, which might be expressed in the stage gestures and expressions of a female character in traditional opera, the posture of my mother's generation when serving tea, or the expression in old photographs of [recently deceased novelist] Eileen Chang [whose works were largely set in 1930s Shanghai]. They all have a kind of tranquil beauty. I feel these things all have the quality and style of the Song.

Modern spirits, classical academies

Q: In Paris the rebel San Yu came into contact with Modernism, and from there communed directly with the spirit of Song art. But Xu Beihong (1895-1953) studied in Paris at the same time. Wasn't what he brought back with him to China, and which became very influential, the classical realist technique which we see in the Louvre exhibition? Qing painters deprecated Western painting as "fine craftsmanship, but not art." But wouldn't one think that the Western Modernism of that time came closest in tone to Chinese art? Or couldn't we say that realist technique is also part of the spirit of Song art?

A: San Yu really was a rebel. In Paris he indulged in wine, women and song, hung out with anti-academian Modernist painters, and was not formally enrolled at any art school. Xu Beihong enrolled at the 丱ole des Beaux-Arts, and what he learnt there was naturally the traditional techniques of classical Realism. After returning to China, he made these realist techniques the basis of contemporary Chinese academic tradition. Later, due to political influence, art academies put all their effort into studying Soviet Realism, and finally developed what today in mainland China is called Chinese Realism.

Today Chinese Realism is not only the mainstream of mainland painting, it is also very popular in New York, and even sells quite well on the market. The precision techniques of Western academic Realism, together with Oriental grace and poet-icism, make a very strange combination. The ability to paint realistically had been ignored over the previous hundred years, but today not only has the balance been redressed, perhaps things have even gone rather too far--the degree of detail is astonishing. The peak reached by Song art was a perfect balance. I think perhaps this is the way culture develops--once you've reached the summit, you need to break things down and get to know them again, and develop towards a new peak.

Returning to the source of man and nature

Q: With poetic exam topics like "Deep in the mountains, whence sounds the bell," Huizong elevated the realistic technique and craftsmanship of Chinese painting to the level of literati painting. Xu Beihong brought back Realism from the West and used exam topics like "Sichuanese at Work" in the attempt to pull Chinese painters back to reality. In Taiwan in the 1990s, as an educator in the field of art, what do you think are the issues we have to face today? Since Kang Youwei [the leading light of the ill-fated reform movement of 1898], have any new ideas appeared on the theme of what to adopt and what to discard in Eastern and Western art, or should I say of the filial child versus the wanderer? And what inspiration can we get from the concurrent exhibitions of outstanding Chinese and Western classical paintings?

A: The Opium War has been over for 150 years, and we all have elements of Eastern and Western culture in us. We should be able to walk out of this trap. People are people, and there's no need to divide them into ancient and modern, Western and Oriental, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese. We should open our hearts and minds and look at the works of art synthesized under different conditions of life around the world. The West, Africa, the Middle East, Taiwan, aboriginals--they're all sources of nourishment for creativity. This cultural nourishment should make us more and more healthy, not more and more morbid or more and more narrow. The Tang dynasty was very healthy.

I feel that comparisons of Eastern and Western art or discussions about realism versus freehand brushwork [in traditional Chinese painting] are for the convenience of holding conferences or writing books; they have nothing at all to do with the creative artists. Painters like Qi Baishi (1863-1957) or Picasso didn't worry about East or West, realist or freehand. Both of them were still painting innocently and delightfully in their 90s, and you can take their works anywhere, and everyone likes them. It's because they stood at humanity's source. This is the wisdom we need to rediscover when facing Eastern and Western art, otherwise all our categories of education and knowledge will become obstacles.

Training the rank and file of art

Abstract discussions do no good: works of art themselves are the only eloquent arguments. Look at all the polemics and debate in art circles since the end of the Qing dynasty--see how much energy everyone has wasted on arguing about East and West, abstract and representational

（right） Do Norway's mountains mimic Shi Tao's brush? （photo by Fu Shen）

（left） In a museum in the tourist season, the chance to contemplate works of art peacefully is hard to find. Shown here is the Louvre in Paris.

（right） When handscrolls are completely unfurled for display in museums, do they lose their suspenseful intimacy? This one is Pure and Remote View of Hills and Streams by Xia Gui of the Southern Song dynasty.

（left） Song dynasty art had many faces. Mountains and rivers, birds and flowers, ink washes, and blue-and-green landscapes all had their place.This is Zhao Chang's New Year's Day. （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）

（right） What was the artist emperor's mood, deep in his palace gardens,when he was moved by the sight of this pair of Chinese bulbuls snuggling up together? This is the Song emperor Huizong's Chimonanthus and Birds. （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）

（left） Deer in the East: Herd of Deer in a Maple Grove, by an anonymous artist of the Five Dynasties period （10th century AD）. （courtesy of the National Palace Museum）

（right） Deer in the West: The Deer Hunt, by 17th-century artist Paul Bril of the Flanders school. （courtesy of the Dimensions Endowment of Art）

（left） The National Palace Museum is a paradise where students and staff from art institutes discuss paintings and hone their knowledge. What "landscape" do these experts see from the apex of society's art pyramid? Pictured is internationally renowned scholar Fu Shen teaching a class.

（right） A scene from the exhibition of works by San Yu at the National Museum of History. What images will stay in this toddler's memory?