This is a 14th century painting I've got in my hand here.

The whole viewing of a Chinese painting is a ritual enactment of leaving our world and moving into the world of the painting.

Maxwell Hearn is about to become curator of the Asian Art Department at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He oversees what some say is the most comprehensive collection in the world.

Hearn's specialty is Chinese scroll painting.

He took a 14th century painting out of storage to show the New York Times the intimate way that these works were meant to be experienced.

The scroll is protected, it's lovingly swaddled in silks and protective boxes.

The physical connection to the work of art is really important and every surface we encounter, there's beautiful ancient brocades, this one dates to the 17th or 18th century, it's an ivory clasp, a nice woven silk ribbon that secures the piece.

So as we unroll the scroll, we encounter these bands of silk that are called ge shui, which means moat.

So you're actually crossing a moat, entering into the space of the picture, and oftentimes that brocade border is a place for collectors to place their seals of ownership.

And then the next part of the scroll is called the frontispiece.

This introduces the scroll, it gives the artist's name, Fang Hu Zhen Ji, and finally we enter the world of the painting.

The artist, Fang Congyi, has given us something to identify with here.

We see the roofs of a temple hall on this peninsula in the foreground, and it's from this vantage point that we can enter into the painting.

So we're given an anchorage here, and as we walk through these trees right down to the spit of land at the very end, we can focus on these beautiful grasses drawn with maybe a very fine-tipped brush.

So our focus is really narrowed into the foreground.

We look up, we see this vast expanse, and then something magical takes place.

It is a kind of transformation, a transmutation of space that the artist has created so that we leap in a matter of inches from these fine grasses across to trees that are already clearly a mile away from the foreground trees that we saw just a minute ago.

That shift in scale makes this mountain enormously high, so we've gone from a contemplation of deep distance to a contemplation of height, of unimaginable towering height.

And then this extraordinary Taoist painter reminds us of the impermanence of the universe, that even this substantial granitic cliff can be dissolved and return again into vaporous qi, or the breath of the universe.

And the very last few inches of the scroll, we return to nothingness.

Only the Qianlong Emperor was brazen enough to put his seals here to interrupt that contemplation of the void.

The other remarkable thing about Chinese paintings is these hand scrolls have paper mounted behind them to cushion the painting from the roller, but the custom arose of inscribing these blank papers.

This man begins by saying that the Yun Shan Tu Yi Fu Shang Qing Gao Shi Fang Fang Hu Suo Zuo Ye, he's given the painting a title, The Cloudy Mountains, and he says that this painting was done by the lofty scholar from the Upper Purity Temple, Mr. Fang Fang Hu.

The whole thing becomes a commentary about the painting, about the artist, his place in art history, and there are a number of these commentaries that are appended after the work of art.

These are all dating to the early 15th century.

An inscription was added to in very recent times.

This is actually dated to 1949 by Wu Hufan, who was C.C.

Wong, who was the last collector of this, and I later studied painting with C.C.

Wong.

So, in fact, through this inscription, my teacher C.C.

Wong's name is mentioned, so I become a part of the history of this scroll.