Major Exhibition Fills Four Nelson-Atkins Galleries
An exhibition that juxtaposes thousand-year-old Chinese landscape paintings with the monumental landscapes of the living Chinese master Xu Longsen, Journey through Mountains and Rivers: Chinese Landscapes Ancient and Modern, opens on Feb. 8 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The exhibition celebrates six treasured landscapes from the Nelson’s collection. An unique opportunity to view these masterworks which, because of their fragility, are rarely displayed. In conversation with these ancient works are 14 landscape paintings by Xu Longsen ranging from small, fan-shaped paintings to a monumental, horizontal scroll which is the largest Chinese landscape painting ever created and has never before been displayed in public.
The exhibition will be presented in four galleries in the Nelson-Atkins Building. Kirkwood Hall will display the hand scroll Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff, attributed to Qiao Zhongchang. This painting is celebrated for its remarkable psychological insights into the famous Red Cliff poem composed by Su Shi (1037 – 1101), a senior contemporary of Qiao. A special interactive program on a sliding iPad can be moved across the scroll case, allowing visitors to engage fully with the cultural and historical background of this work. In conversation with the Red Cliff is Xu Longsen’s monumental horizontal scroll The Law of the Dao is its Being What it Is, painted during six years from 2002–2008 and displayed in public for the first time. Almost 90 feet long and over 12 feet tall, this scroll will be positioned in a semicircle, immersing visitors in a dense landscape of mountains, forests and streams.
On the museum’s second floor, visitors can view Xu Longsen at work in his recreated artist’s studio, complete with the Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Studio (brush, ink, inkstone, and paper). Xu will be in residence for one week (February 8–15). Next door, in the Chinese Furniture Gallery, visitors can enjoy Xu’s smaller paintings together with his collection of scholars’ rocks. These naturally weathered and fantastically shaped stones were appreciated by Chinese scholars and artists who valued them more highly than statues or sculpture. Rocks were often regarded as miniature landscapes, so visitors can enjoy the resonance between them and the paintings. From this gallery visitors can take a journey back in time to the Chinese painting Gallery, in which are displayed eight famous paintings of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) Dynasties.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111
www.nelson-atkins.org
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