Exhibition Review: China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta
In the fall semester of 2023, I—and likely every faculty member in North America teaching about the arts of China—had an opportunity to say at least once a week, ‘If you can get to Cleveland before January, you will see this’, referring to one of the more than 240 objects—paintings, metalwork, jade, ceramics, furniture, prints, and calligraphy—on view in ‘China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta’, which opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) on 10 September and closed on 7 January 2024. During the nearly four months of the exhibition’s run, anyone who visited could see superior objects that narrate the history of Chinese art from the Neolithic period through the 19th century.
The objects were drawn exclusively from Jiangnan, the region of southeastern China below the Yangzi river, which includes the cities of Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Yangzhou, and extends southward to include parts of Anhui and, by some definitions of China, as far south as Guangdong. The show distinguished itself with this regional focus. Many of China’s masterworks of painting and exquisite porcelains are associated with Jiangnan, but the third, second, and first millennia BCE and the first millennium CE of Chinese art history are narrated through Jiangnan, as well. A regional retrospective of artistic achievement is standard in provincial museums in China but rare in North America. This bold attempt to present a comprehensive view of Chinese art history using pieces only from Jiangnan was successful. It challenged organizers of future exhibitions outside China to attempt a Neolithic-to-21st-century history from another region.
The exhibition comprised six large spaces, some of them L- or U-shaped. Objects were placed chronologically, so that jade primarily from the early period and paintings of Jiangnan primarily from the Ming (1368–1644) were logically placed in the first and fourth areas, respectively.
Mountains of the Immortals
By Chen Ruyan (c. 1331–71); Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), 1300–70
Handscroll: ink and colour on silk; 33.4 x 97.3 cm (image)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Mrs A. Dean Perry
Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
The fact that Shanghai is in Jiangnan could have made it possible for the show’s curators to rely heavily on that city’s museum for objects, but only nine came from there: four paintings, including the intriguing A Gathering of Five Suzhou Natives and Zhang Qi’s Venerable Friends; a Gu family embroidery with a Dong Qichang colophon; a statue of a monk made of bamboo; two pieces of Qing (1644–1911) porcelain; and a Tang (618–907) mirror. Objects were borrowed from the Zhejiang Provincial Museum and Zhejiang Archaeological Institute, of course, but the museums, institutes, and private collections behind the displayed objects produced a show that offered not only a four-millennia narrative of Chinese art but also impressive holdings of dozens of museums in North America, Europe, and, to a lesser extent, East Asia. The East Asian collections represented were the previously mentioned Shanghai Museum and Zhejiang Provincial Museum, the Palace Museum (in Beijing), Chinese National Silk Museum (in Hangzhou), Nanjing Museum, Anhui Museum, Tokyo National Museum, and Nezu Museum. Objects also came from European museums and collections in London, Oxford, Dorset, Cologne, Münster, and Hildesheim. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Asian Art Museum were two North American lenders, and so were the Art Institute of Chicago, Detroit Institute of Arts, Nelson-Atkins Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the university museums of Alberta, Berkeley, Harvard, and Princeton, as well as ten private collections.
Nearly one-third of the exhibition came from the holdings of the CMA. Those who are familiar with that collection know its depth and breadth. They probably also know that Sherman Lee (1918–2008) during his thirty years at the CMA (between 1952 when he began working as chief curator of Oriental Art and 1981 when he retired as director of the museum)—with the assistance of Wai-kam Ho (1924–2005) for much of this period—built a collection of Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian art that was almost without parallel in the United States. During the run of ‘China’s Southern Paradise’, signature pieces in the CMA collection not from Jiangnan were on display in the museum’s permanent galleries. Even as new acquisitions enhance museum holdings across the globe, the permanent collection of the CMA remains an international treasure.
Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing
Attributed to Ma Yuan (c. 1150–after 1255); Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279)
Handscroll: ink and colour on silk; 29.54 × 301.63 cm (image)
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, purchase, William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Media Services
Through every stage of the planning process, which included three years of a global pandemic, the curator Clarissa von Spee and every CMA officersurely were aware of the expectations for a show focussed on Chinese art in Cleveland: it would be measured alongside two landmark exhibitions. The first, in 1968, was ‘Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368)’ mounted by Sherman Lee and Wai-kam Ho. The exhibition launched the study of Yuan art with objects that would become the canon of the field for the next several decades; the text of the catalogue raised questions about Chinese art under non-native rule that would guide scholarly discourse for decades, as well. The vertically constructed peaks in Mountains of the Immortals (fig. 1) by Chen Ruyan (c. 1331–71) spread across the cover of the 1968 catalogue; this painting was of course part of ‘China’s Southern Paradise’.
In the recent exhibition, Mountains of the Immortals was among the porcelains and paintings from the Song (960–1279) and Yuan dynasties in a gallery fittingly entitled ‘Paradise on Earth’. For some visitors, standing in that room would be their first time seeing together Juran’s (act. 960–85) Buddhist Retreat by Streams and Mountains, Ma Yuan’s (c. 1150–after 1255) Drinking in the Moonlight (late 1100s–early 1200s), Li Anzhong’s Cottages in a Misty Grove in Autumn (1117), and Zhao Mengfu’s River Village: Fisherman’s Joy (c. 1302–03), all owned by the CMA (and all frequently discussed in survey courses of Chinese art). And for most people who came to the show, it would be the only time they saw these paintings in the same space as the anonymous Lotus Flowers from the Yuan period, on loan from the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, and two of originally 100 late 12th century paintings of luohan by Zhou Jichang in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, originally from the monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto.
Portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and His Twelve Consorts
By Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) and Chinese painters; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1736–70s
Handscroll: ink and colour on silk; 53.8 x 1154.5 cm (overall)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
Viewers might have seen the four above-mentioned CMA paintings in Cleveland in 1980, when they would have been alongside masterworks of Chinese painting from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. This was the second landmark exhibition against which all future Chinese art exhibitions in not only Cleveland but also international venues would be assessed. Wai-kam Ho and Sherman Lee of the CMA and Laurence Sickman and Marc Wilson of the Nelson-Atkins brought together 282 paintings that had guided research on Chinese painting in the 20th century during decades when it was impossible to borrow artworks from China. Visitors to the show remember seeing the Nelson-Atkins’s Ma Yuan handscroll, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing (fig. 2), and Twelve Views of Landscape by Xia Gui (act. c. 1209–c. 1243), together with Ma Yuan’s Drinking in the Moonlight from the CMA. Followers of the Chinese painting field expect major masterpieces in a show mounted by the CMA, and they were all there, including the renowned mid-Ming paintings from Suzhou by Zhou Chen (c. 1450–c. 1536), Shen Zhou (1427–1509), and Qiu Ying (1494–1552), as were a few rarely seen paintings from the Palace Museum in Beijing, including the portrait of the Kangxi emperor painted in 1622, which finalized the exhibition, and the CMA’s Portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and His Twelve Consorts (1736–70s) (fig. 3) by Giuseppe Castiglione, which was near the exit. It is important to note that decorative objects (fig. 4) in the exhibition were of equally superior quality and importance.
The history of exhibitions is integral to the history of Chinese art. With the addition of ‘China’s Southern Paradise’, any future exhibition in Cleveland will now be measured against three groundbreaking ones.
Raft Cup
Attributed to Zhu Bishan (c. 1300–after 1362); Yuan (1279–1368) or early Ming dynasty (1368–1644), 1300s–1400s
Hammered and soldered silver with chased decoration; height 16 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
