Are there secret meanings behind these paintings of mountains and rivers?

September 13, 2017, the New York Times published an article, If Those Mountains Could Talk, featuring the Chinese landscape exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, called Streams and Mountains Without End.

One of the things that visitors who are more familiar with other parts of the museum will recognize when they come into our galleries immediately is that the formats of the painting are a little different from what you would see in the European painting galleries, and the materials are different.

So to start with the main formats of Chinese painting that you'll see in this show, hand scroll format, where you have a scroll that reads from right to left, and kind of cinematic in that it flows over time.

We also have hanging scrolls that hang on walls, fans that people would paint on, and albums.

Those are the main formats.

And generally the paintings are on either paper, what is sometimes called rice paper in English, a very absorbent paper, and then silk.

This exhibition, which showcases more than 120 Chinese landscape paintings in three rotations, offers some insights into this thousand-year-old Chinese tradition.

Each rotation will last five to six months, and the show will run from August 26, 2017 to January 6, 2019.

Generally the materials are light-sensitive, and so that's part of why we do all these rotating exhibitions in these galleries, is because we'll put works on view for a little while, a few months or so, and then we'll take them off.

So we're in the first gallery of the exhibition now.

This is the gallery that's named after the exhibition itself.

It's called Streams and Mountains Without End.

And I'm standing in front of the painting that sort of stimulated this exhibition in my mind.

This is a long landscape hand scroll from around the turn of the 15th century.

It's a Ming Dynasty painting.

Actually looking at it, unrolling it piece by piece for the viewer, him or herself, is a kind of a journey.

And so you begin in this little mountain hamlet here.

You can see that the season is springtime.

There are little figures in here that we can follow throughout the landscape and sort of travel with them.

Here we have two guys crossing a bridge.

Here a turbulent patch of water with a boat that's being pulled back into shore.

And as you move through the landscape, something really interesting happens.

The seasons actually change from what appears to be spring in the beginning through a kind of summery, mist-suffused summer scene into autumn.

And then finally, at the end of the scroll, you conclude with a snow scene, winter.

We're in the second gallery now.

This is the gallery called The Landscape of Poetry.

And all the paintings in this gallery were made in some kind of response to poetry.

This painting is particularly fun.

And here we see a guy sitting here at the water's edge.

And then up here, we see a bank of clouds rising from this marshy floodplain.

And so, you know, over time, people have come to think that this is this Wong Wei poem that says, I walk to the place where the water ends, and I sit and watch at the time when the clouds rise.

As early as 1,000 years ago, Chinese artists wanted their paintings to be poetry, not merely a copy of the real scene.

Calligraphy writings are often a part of the Chinese painting.

Some are poems to describe the painted scene.

Others are the painting's title, artist's signature and date, or other notations about that painting.

I'm standing in front of, in some ways, one of the most exciting artworks in the exhibition because this is from a private collection, and it's a very old, very important early treasure of what we call the literati painting movement.

This is painting made sort of by scholars for scholars.

And this is the kind of painting that's really trying to operate like poetry.

It's not telling you everything.

It's just suggesting around the edges.

And your job as a knowledgeable viewer is to sort of finish the sentence.

Gallery 3 is a landscape of magic.

To an educated Chinese viewer, when they see the blue-green landscapes, they will think of two things.

One is of the distant past, antiquity, and the other is magic.

Blue-green palette, when it's used for landscapes, it was kind of another sort of symbolic code in Chinese landscape painting, where the painter is signaling to you that the world depicted within is very much a kind of magical landscape.

This is not a place that you could just walk out your front door and hop on a horse and go visit.

This is a place that you would need to go through some kind of magical portal to get to.

These are actually the kind of stones, the kind of minerals that would be used to create the pigments that would be used in these vibrant paintings.

So for instance, we have malachite, the green on the right.

This is lapis lazuli.

That was sometimes used, azurite, another blue mineral.

The fourth gallery is called Landscape of Reclusion.

We're standing in the fourth gallery here, and this is called the Landscape of Reclusion.

And here I'm dealing with this idea that's very prevalent in Chinese art, Chinese literature, Chinese intellectual philosophy, this idea that when things are going haywire in society, it is a totally acceptable solution to turn your back on society and to retreat into the mountains, to just communing either with nature or with literature, with poetry.

These are two renderings of one particular guy's kind of retirement villa, the place that he went to get away from it all.

For casual viewers, the small shed and tiny human figures can easily be missed compared to the majesty of nature.

This is the sixth gallery in the exhibition.

This is called the Art Historical Landscape, and this is a kind of self-consciousness that the tradition achieved very early.

Here we mostly have paintings from the 17th century.

This is the time of this really important artist, Dong Qichang.

Throughout his entire life, he was constantly thinking about the great old landscape painting masters who came before him.

Here we have an album from 1630, one of his really important late works, him in each leaf sort of taking on some old master or another, but through his very subjective, interpretive lens.

This is the seventh gallery.

This is called the Landscape of the Garden.

The process of making a garden is the kind of act of creation very similar to landscape painting.

You get to arrange the landscape according to your own imagination, to your own sense.

Here where we see a little thatched hut in the midst of this kind of created, curated landscape, you can see all these fantastic rocks.

He's actually playing the guqin for that crane, you see, because cranes will dance if you play music for them.

This is a real thing.

And so he's sitting there playing music for his crane, that's a way of engaging with this kind of auspicious creature and with nature generally.

The ninth gallery is the last, called Riverscapes.

And here I was inspired to put this gallery together because I was just thinking to myself, so many of the landscape paintings that we encounter in these galleries, a lot of times they're mostly water.

This is a big piece of state art.

This was created for the emperor, probably the Kangxi emperor in the 1680s in the early Qing Dynasty.

And it's a document of this powerful river that runs through China, the Yellow River.

They were documented here in this super deluxe court visual language, very different from a lot of the literati paintings we're seeing in this exhibition.

Another work of art in this room called the Riverscape, and this is actually another piece of court art coming again from the Qing Dynasty court.

This emperor that we see pictured here, the Qianlong emperor, who ruled for the last three quarters of the 18th century, he went down to the south, the sort of heartland of China, to do what was called the Southern Inspection Tour.

And so here we see him inspecting the confluence of the Yellow River and the Huai River.

This is an important confluence of two rivers that had some effect on whether it was going to flood in these very important agricultural regions.

And it looks like he's about nine feet tall.

He actually wasn't taller than everybody else.

It's just that because of his status as the emperor, this is one of 12 scrolls of this size.

They're all the same height.

So it's a very impressive size.

Why are the Chinese so keen on the mountain river landscapes?

The viewer can draw many different answers.

One of them, perhaps, is that it reflects Taoist philosophy.

Traditional landscapes usually have majestic mountains and huge rivers with tiny human figures.

This contrast reflects the Chinese Taoist view of the world.

Humans are small and mortal and must live in harmony with nature.

Only mountains and rivers last for eternity.