Exhibition Of Chinese Flower And Bird Painting Closes Tomorrow In New York Before Traveling To Santa Barbara

This weekend marks the closing of “Flowers on a River: The Art of Chinese Flower-and-Bird Painting, 1368-1911, Masterworks from Tianjin Museum and Changzhou Museum,” an exhibition at the China Institute Gallery in New York.

The gallery—the only museum in the United States to exclusively show Chinese art—calls it “the largest survey of its kind outside of China and the first in the U.S.”

The exhibition—the first time Chinese masterpieces have traveled from China to the gallery since the beginning of the pandemic—will be on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from October 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024.

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Featuring over 100 masterworks by 59 artists from the Ming and Qing dynasties, Flowers on a River highlights the artists’ literati, academic and individual styles. According to the gallery, “the Chinese concept of “humanity in harmony with nature (is) examined, as well as the use of a special language of coded imagery to communicate meaning, which is central to Chinese art and culture. Flower-and-bird painting is one of three major genres of Chinese painting—alongside landscape and figure painting.”

Interestingly, the exhibition features eight women artists, including Ma Quan and Yun Bing, who the museum says were “born into families of artists during the Qing dynasty (and) rose to prominence through the legacies of their fathers and grandfathers.” Other women artists featured were artistic courtesans, while a few made a living through art, such as Miao Jiahui, an art teacher and uncredited artist, who gave her work to the Empress Dowager Cixi to sign.

The central work in the exhibition is the 1697 Qing dynasty hand scroll Flowers on a River, a 42-foot horizontal scroll by Zhu Da (1626-1705), known as Bada Shanren, that was last seen outside of China in a 2013 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

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The gallery said Bada Shanren was a prince in the imperial Ming family, who “went into hiding at a Buddhist temple and became a monk after the Manchu conquest of 1644. In 1680, he began a career as a working artist excelling in painting and calligraphy. His epic scroll Flowers on a River, painted when he was 72 years old, depicts the lifespan of a lotus flower from a seed to blossoms, faded into a landscape, which holds many secret codes related to his life journey. As the master of individualism, both meditative and joyous, his free and loose brushwork anticipates abstraction by hundreds of years.”

“Bada Shanren pushed the expressive possibilities of monochrome ink and brush to the extreme, resulting in incredibly rich effects with an unmistakable individual character,” said Willow Weilan Hai, lead curator of the exhibition and director and chief curator of the gallery. “No one in the past has ever reached his level of achievement in this regard, and probably few after him will.”