Exhibition Dates
Rotation One: July 31, 2021–January 9, 2022
Rotation Two: January 31, 2022–August 14, 2022
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 210-16, Douglas Dillon Galleries, Floor 2
The twin themes of solitude and togetherness in Chinese art are explored in the exhibition Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art, on view through August 14, 2022 at The Met. For more than 2,000 years, reclusion—removing oneself from society—has been presented as the ideal condition for mental cultivation and transcending worldly troubles. At the same time, communion with like-minded people has been celebrated as essential to the human experience. This choice, to be alone or to be together, has been central to the lives of thinkers and artists, and Chinese art abounds with images of figures who pursued both paths—as well as those who wove them together in complex and surprising ways.
Presented in two rotations, this exhibition brings together more than 120 works of painting, calligraphy, and decorative arts from the 11th to 21st century that illuminate this choice—depictions of why and how people have sought space from the world or attempted to bridge the divide between themselves and others. In the wake of 2020, a year that isolated people physically but connected them virtually in unprecedented ways, this exploration of premodern Chinese reclusion and communion invites meditation on the fracture and facture of human connection in our own time.
The exhibition is made possible by the Joseph Hotung Fund.
The exhibition is organized thematically in eight sections: Confronting Nature, The Rustic Retreat, Fishermen and Woodcutters, Famous Recluses, Bridging the Distance, The Garden, The Poetry of Reclusion, and The Elegant Gathering. Works on view are drawn almost entirely from The Met collection.
Highlights of the first rotation (July 31, 2021–January 9, 2022) included Summer Retreat in the Eastern Grove (datable to before 1515), an early work of painting and calligraphy by Wen Zhengming, the leading figure of the Ming-dynasty Suzhou art scene; Wu Li’s Whiling Away the Summer (dated 1679), a tour de force of elegant brushwork that depicts a gentleman enjoying the solitude of his garden on a summer afternoon; and Li Jie’s Fisherman’s Lodge at Mt. Xisai (circa 1170), one of the earliest depictions of a scholar’s country retreat to survive from Chinese art and a foundational work for the study of reclusion.
The second rotation (January 31, 2022–August 14, 2022) features Wang Fu’s Joys of the Fishermen, an early 15th-century masterpiece in which a long river scene unfurls across a handscroll of varied ink tones more than 20 feet in length. Two exquisite albums of painting and poetry by Gong Xian, leader of the Nanjing art scene in the second half of the 17th century, are on view in adjacent galleries, providing a rare chance to study multiple works by this artist. The rotation also displays important loans from private collections, including Lu Zhi’s Banquet on the Lantern Festival, dated 1547, a never-before-exhibited handscroll that also includes calligraphy by the participants of the event depicted.
Credits
Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art is organized by Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, the Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang Associate Curator of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in the Department of Asian Art.
The exhibition is featured on The Met website as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hashtag #MetChineseArt.
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January 26, 2022
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