FOR 10/22-SET 10/13

‘Figures and Landscapes In Asian Art’ At The Yale Art Gallery Through December 12

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NEW HAVEN, CONN. – The variety of representations of the human figure and natural landscape in Asian art is explored in an exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery that ranges from Neolithic ceramics to Twentieth Century sculpture and includes an array of painted scrolls, screens, and album leaves. “Figures and Landscapes in Asian Art,” on view through December 12, draws from the Art Gallery’s permanent collection, supplemented by spectacular loans from private collectors.

The earliest art objects in China were vessels decorated with abstract and animal forms. By the late third millennium BC, stick figures, such as those on the exhibited Majiayao Culture storage jar, began to appear. A millennium later, a clear human face appears on one side of a bronze finial with an animal mask on the other. By the second century BC, representations of humans appear in the form of tomb figurines that gave status to the deceased in the afterlife. Figures also appeared among undulating cloud-like bands that developed into landscape settings, as seen on the censors from the Second and First Centuries BC and the “hill jars” of the First and Second Centuries AD.

From these beginnings, the exhibition traces the development of the separate genres of figure and landscape painting in China. Two Eleventh Century portraits of octogenarian statesmen of the Song dynasty represent the moral authority of age in a Confucian, bureaucratic society. Developed landscapes appear in an album leaf by the Twelfth Century painter Li Shan and on a painted pillow from the same period. Later traditions of Chinese landscape painting are represented by works by such masters as Shen Zhou, Ju Jie, Dong Qichang, Lan Ying and Gong Xian.

The transmission of Continental figural styles to Japan is represented by a Haniwa figure of a helmeted warrior from the Sixth to Seventeenth Century AD. Later depictions of Chinese subject matter – famous men who resisted society’s constraints – appear on two Seventeenth Century Japanese screens, while traditions of Chinese scholar paintings are reflected in Nineteenth Century Japanese landscape hanging scrolls. The exhibition is brought into the Twentieth Century with an exquisite porcelain sculpture, “View of Distant Sea II,” by the contemporary Japanese artist Sueharu Fukami.

Gallery talks on the exhibition will be given on October 12, at 2 pm and October 14, at noon by Patricia Volk, a graduate student in the history of art. David Sensabaugh will give an art la carte talk at 12:20 pm on November 17.