Khan Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty.

So it's really been a group effort to do this extraordinary exhibition.

I'm also responsible for a second exhibition entitled Yuan Revolution, Art and Dynastic

Change, which is in our permanent galleries on the second floor.

Those two exhibitions combined mean that we have more great Yuan art in this building than under any other museum roof in the world.

So it's really a remarkable achievement, we're very proud of this.

So the Yuan Dynasty is significant because it represents an extraordinary collision of worlds.

The Mongols, represented on your left by Kublai Khan, were a small confederacy of nomadic peoples living in the deserts north of China, who succeeded in conquering the largest empire known to mankind.

And the last people they succeeded in absorbing into their empire were the southern Song Chinese, and that cultural world is represented by Zhao Mengfu, whose idealized portrait is on the left, on your right.

These two worlds really were so incompatible, and yet they formed an extraordinary merging of ideas and cultures that became a watershed in Chinese history, and really defined the direction of Chinese art from this point forward.

Kublai, as you know, was someone who probably could not read Chinese, and yet he understood the wisdom of employing the Chinese educated elite as members of the ruling class because of their extraordinary heritage.

China was a country, the most populous in the world, which had a tradition of three millennia of ruling large empires.

The Mongols had none of that in their background.

They had very little in the way of material culture.

They were warriors, but they rapidly learned, and Kublai was, I think, perhaps the preeminent example of a man who recognized that you could conquer China by the sword, but you couldn't rule it that way.

So the empire that the Mongols created stretched from Korea to the Danube River.

Had Genghis Khan not died in 1215 and forced the Mongol troops to return to Karakoram for a curtail to decide who his successor would be, we might all be living under Mongol heritage.

There would be no Europe.

It would just be a greater Asia.

But Kublai, who was Genghis's grandson, or great-grandson, decided to make his capital in what is present-day Beijing, or Dadu, the great capital.

I can barely see it here.

So while clearly he chose the wealthiest part of his empire as the seat of power, and because of that, he effectively gave up control over the western reaches of his empire.

So the Ilkhanate, the Golden Horde, paid nominal or lip service to his rulership as the Khagan or Great Khan, but in fact, they were often at odds with Kublai.

And for all intents and purposes, his rulership extended only into Central Asia and the borders we see as the Yuan Dynasty.

But that dynasty, while unifying China for the first time under a foreign rulership, was not a coherent entity.

In fact, what we see is that the Mongols unified an empire that had been riven by earlier invasions into China, so that in the north you had first the Liao and then the Jin Dynasty, who succeeded in 1127 in capturing the northern Song capital at Kaifeng, which they called their southern capital or Nanjing.

Their central capital, Zhongdu, was Beijing.

It fell to Genghis in 1215, and finally Nanjing fell, or Kaifeng fell to the Mongols in 1237.

But it was another 60 years before the Mongols were able to invade first Tibet and Dali, or what is Yunnan province, and slowly make their way into southern Song and capture that half of the empire.

As a result, the citizens of the southern Song were branded as the least desirable citizens of the empire.

They were treated prejudiciously.

The educated elite that were concentrated in the southern Song capital at Hangzhou or

Lin'an were not allowed to serve in office generally.

They were discriminated against.

So in the classes of society that the Mongols had established, Mongols were on top, followed by non-Chinese, the Si Mu, people from Central Asia, then the northern Chinese, who had already been living under non-Chinese rule for over 150 years at that point, and finally the southerners.

So the southern elite, the men who really were the most erudite members of that society, were the ones who were treated with the least respect.

The civil service recruitment examinations were eliminated by the Mongols and not resuscitated for a number of years.

And even then, only a small number of Chinese ever succeeded in achieving high rank under the Mongols.

So it was really under that set of circumstances that art under the Yuan dynasty was transformed.

And in particular, it was men who owed their allegiance to the southern Song who created a new art form as a kind of protest art.

One of the greatest surviving examples of that is this painting of what is called the

Jun Gu, or the Noble Steed's Bones, painted by Gong Kai, who was a man who actually resisted the Mongol invasion as a military man.

He was an ardent Song loyalist for his entire life.

He died in 1304.

And this painting, probably from around 1300, is emblematic of his sense of despair at having lost the empire, this sort of personal sense of responsibility.

As you can see, the horse is bent down.

His tail is being blown by the wind.

His gaunt frame exposes his spine, his haunch, and his many ribs.

And it is the ribs that Gong Kai pointed to in his own poem, which is appended after the painting, written in an archaic seal script.

And in this poem, we begin to understand the layers of meaning that are embedded in this iconic image.

I'll read just the poem for you.

Yi Cong Yun Wu, Jiang Tian Guan, Kong Jin Xian Qiao, She Er Xian, Jin Ri You Xie, Lian

Jun Gu, Xi Yang Xia An, Ying Ru Shan.

So ever since the clouds and the mist have descended upon the heavenly passes when the

Mongols occupied China, the southern part of China, the 12 imperial stables of the former dynasty are empty.

So the horse here is an emblem for the power of the martial might of traditional China.

It was an icon during the Tang dynasty when paintings like this were often a fine stage.

We think of the ceramic horses of the Tang dynasty as well, emblematic of the ability of Tang China to project its power.

Now the stables of the emperor are empty.

Horses, of course, are also emblematic of the high officials who served under the emperor.

So he goes on to explain in the poem that today, who is it that will lament this noble horse's bones?

In the setting sun, he strolls along the, or he walks dejectedly, I would say, along the sandy shores.

His shadow is like a mountain.

You look at this enormous sense of the horse's withers there, and it's really mountain-like.

So there is this powerful, imposing image of the horse.

Even in this sense of despair, the horse carries this enormous sort of monumental quality of a mountain.

In the rest of his inscription, he goes on to describe how a normal horse has about 10 ribs, and a fine horse has more than that.

But a 1,000-league horse, a horse that can run for 1,000 leagues, has 15, as this animal does.

But the only way one can see those 15 ribs is if the horse is emaciated.

So he says there's really no escaping the fact that this horse has to be emaciated in order to see its true qualities.

So it becomes this emblem of survival under the austere conditions of living under the

Mongols.

Here is a man who no longer has a direction.

He's out of office.

He's withdrawn from public service.

He's aimlessly moving through life, and yet this willingness to survive in this sense of his own moral integrity is what comes across in this image.

And that's exactly how all of the later appreciators of this painting responded to it.

There are many, many colophons appended to the painting.

All of them see this horse as an image of Gunkai himself.

And so this is really a watershed moment in Chinese history, when paintings by these literati, the elite educated men of the Southern Song in particular, became autobiographical.

They became understood as self-referential.

Now a generation later, Gunkai's horse was clearly so well-known that it was quoted in another work of art.

This one by Ren Renfa, and you can see there's several, I count three important distinctions here.

One is it's painted in colors on silk.

Two, the horse is wearing a lead.

And three, the horse is walking in another direction.

That's significant in a hand scroll, where moving towards the left is moving away from the center of power.

Moving to the right is returning towards the center of power.

And this painting is, this horse is actually one of two horses painted by Ren Renfa, around let's say 1320.

Now Ren was a generation younger than Gunkai.

He passed the civil service exams when he was 17 years old, just four years before the fall of Hangzhou to the Mongols.

And shortly after the empire was completely vanquished, the Song empire, Ren Renfa decided to serve under the Mongols.

And he did so for the next 48 years, rising in rank to very high position.

He was particularly specialized in aquatic engineering and water management.

So this painting becomes a kind of self-defense for his choice not to remain in retirement, but to go forward and serve.

And in his inscription, what he explains is that both these horses are moral exemplars.

There is the well-fed horse who chooses to serve in government, obviously for the betterment of the state, and there is also the moral choice of remaining outside of government service as a loyalist, an imin, a leftover subject of the Song dynasty.

You notice that both horses are now moving in the same direction.

Not through political coercion, but through the shared moral compass.

So what Ren Renfa is saying is, don't be deceived by outward appearance.

Both these horses can be valued as moral exemplars.

And he also goes on to point out, of course, that there are those who fatten themselves at the expense of the people.

There are also those who remain emaciated, even though they're loyal servants of the government.

So that whether to serve or not became a very important issue at this period.

One could carry that contrast between those who serve and those who remain out of office even further with these two landscapes.

One on the top is painted by Chen Xuan, the one on the bottom is by Zhao Mengfu.

These men lived in the same city of Wuxing, just 60 miles from the southern Song capital of Hangzhou, and they were both members of the Song elite.

And yet their difference in age, Chen Xuan was 40 when Hangzhou fell to the Mongols in 1276.

Zhao Mengfu was barely 20.

When that happened, Chen Xuan burned his books and renounced any association with the Confucian class because he felt the Confucian elite had failed to maintain the integrity of the

Song dynasty and ultimately were responsible for allowing it to fall to the Mongols.

So he withdrew from society and pursued painting as a way of supporting himself for the rest of his life.

Zhao Mengfu took a very different course, and yet in both these paintings we see them adopting a very similar notion of how to recover the antique spirit of China through a return to archaic styles using this blue-green landscape style.

In Chen Xuan's painting, for example, you see these angular, stylized mountains, very frontal with the sort of naive depictions of houses in the foreground.

It's very much a reference to antique painting styles, and therefore the story he's presenting is also a reference to one of China's great culture heroes.

This is Wang Xizhi, the great patriarch of Chinese calligraphy who was inspired by the undulating necks of the geese that he's watching here from his famous Orchid Pavilion.

So in Chen Xuan's image, he's not only adopting a kind of naive antique style, but he's harking back to a time when China had a golden age of culture.

It was also a time when China was partially absorbed by non-Chinese peoples.

So it was also a time of struggle between how was China to maintain its cultural identity.

So during this period, Chen Xuan refers to this antique style as a way of really reminding

China that it has this legacy of survival and continuity.

Now Zhang Mengfu, after 10 years of enforced retirement, was actively recruited by Kublai himself.

He was one of 27 men who were recruited specifically by the Khan to bring the southern intelligentsia into the government, and he was one of the few who actually accepted.

He went to Dadu in 1286, and he stayed there for another eight years or so, actually in

Dadu and then in the provincial capital of Shandong, where he had a significant impact on bettering the lives of the Chinese subjects, including ridding the state of a nefarious financial minister who was gouging the people with the taxes.

He was actually a Central Asian.

And so Zhang Mengfu heroically risked his life to go out on a limb and protest to Kublai himself the depredations of this finance minister.

And so he actively supported the role of better government under the Mongols.

And this image is meant to really underscore his approach to governance, because it's a thinly disguised self-portrait based on a 4th century painting of a man named Xie Youyu.

The title of the painting is The Mined Landscape of Xie Youyu.

Xie Youyu was a government official who maintained that while he was not perhaps the most adept at court ritual, he was the most morally pure because he maintained the spirit of mountains and valleys in his heart while serving in government.

So clearly Zhang Mengfu wanted to convey in this archaic image that he too was preserving the moral integrity of a man living in reclusion while serving in office.

After Kublai died in 1294, Zhang Mengfu, perhaps feeling that the change in rulers was something that might endanger him personally, opted to retire from office.

He returned home to Wuxing.

But after another year, in 1296, he painted this image of a groom and horse for a man named Feiqing, who was a surveillance commissioner, a man who was responsible for upholding the moral integrity of the government and also recruiting new people into office.

And I think what this is is a plea on the part of Zhang Mengfu to be recognized and being brought back into government in an appropriate role.

So obviously with the passage of time, Zhang Mengfu was not satisfied to remain in retirement.

He also saw that the opportunity in government was still there.

So this painting, presented to a high official, is apparently an invitation to be recruited back into office.

Now the symbolism here is quite important.

If you look at the way in which the horse is painted, there are these wonderful geometric arcs.

It's the same curve that you see defining the cap rim, the belt, the bridle of the horse.

So there's a real geometry here.

And if you contrast those circular motions with the square, angular forms of the inscription and the format of the painting, what you have is gui and ju.

Guiju, which is circle and square, compass and square, means regulation or order.

So what Zhang Mengfu is suggesting here is that he is a man who has a certain moral rectitude, that the image of circle and square is not just about geometry, but it's about moral qualities.

And there's another layer of meaning here as well, because a man who can judge fine horses, particularly the legendary Bo Le, was also a metaphor for someone who could recognize high character in human beings.