TREASURES OF THE EMPIRE

By ROBERT HUGHES

For human happiness, democracy may be all very well; but for the visual arts, nothing beats 4,000 years of rigorous bureaucratic feudalism presided over by a lofty elite of scholars with a divine Emperor on top. Such is the lesson of the Metropolitan Museum's present exhibition, "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei." Normally when those spavined cliches "treasure," "splendor" or "masterpiece" occur in the name of an exhibition, doubt rises: Methinks the museum doth protest too much. Not this time. In terms of sheer quality, this show can claim to be the greatest conspectus of Chinese art ever held in America.

Its task, on the face of it, is impossible: to epitomize this vast field of visual culture, across four millenniums, with a mere 475 objects--ink paintings and calligraphy, porcelain and jade, lacquer and bronze. And yet it works, for three reasons. The first is the often sublime beauty of the objects. The second is the coherence of its frame: everything comes from the Chinese imperial collections as they developed over the centuries; thus what we see is the slowly changing profile of the highest court taste. And the third is that the museum's 650-page tome of a catalog, prepared under the supervision of Wen C. Fong, the Met's curator of Chinese art, is probably the best introduction to its subject in print.

So why does its cover reproduce a painting that isn't in the show? And why have 22 other choice items gone missing, while the main original sponsors, Mobil and Citibank, pulled out under mainland Chinese pressure as the long process of negotiation and selection was nearing its end? Politics, alas. The loan of these works of art has become a large hot potato in Taipei. And negotiating it proved a diplomatic nightmare for the Met, a four-year walk on eggshells.

On one side there are the Taiwanese officials and others who view the loan to America as a politically essential gesture of cultural goodwill, especially now that mainland China is rattling its missiles and threatening once more to retake what Beijing regards as a runaway province. (Probably the Taipei museum would never have lent the material if the Taiwan government hadn't wanted to stick a finger up Beijing's nostril.) However, Taiwanese cultural nationalists have denounced the loan as a cynical game with irreplaceable national symbols whose meaning cannot in any case be appreciated by the round-eyed barbarians who will flock to the Met to see them. Many Taiwanese regard any American opening to Beijing as betrayal; at the same time, they tend to see themselves, through Taiwan's ownership of the imperial collections, as the true preservers of traditional Chinese art, even though not much art of significance was actually made on that island when it was a province of the empire.

In the face of this tangle of politico-cultural emotions, concessions had to be made. The 11th century painting often considered to be the greatest masterpiece of Northern Sung dynasty landscape, Fan K'uan's Travelers Amid Streams and Mountains, stayed in Taipei, as did the hardly less important scroll by Kuo Hsi, Early Spring, 1072, which graces the catalog's cover. Moreover, there are time limits within the show itself. Its paintings and calligraphies--because of their age and fragility--have to be removed and replaced periodically by others of similar quality and era during the show's run in New York City and later in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington.

When Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war to Mao Zedong in 1949 and fled to Taiwan, he took the cream of the imperial collection with him, 10,000 paintings and calligraphies, more than half a million objects, rare books and documents, in some 4,000 crates--an act of cultural looting (in Taiwan, read: salvage) that had few equals before and has had none since, though it is pointless to criticize such a fait accompli nearly 50 years later. Who knows what might have happened to the art at the hands of the Red Guards, for instance? Since then the whole vast collection has remained in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, carefully conserved but stingily displayed. Thirty-five years ago, a sampling was shown in the U.S., provoking a new level of interest in the study of Asian art.

This show will take things much further, for specialists, no doubt, but especially for the ordinary viewer. There could be no more vivid introduction to the upper reaches of Chinese art, and this takes hold right at the beginning. No matter how many ritual vessels from the late Shang dynasty (13th to 11th centuries B.C.) you may have seen, the memory of them will pale beside the massive ting, or tripod pot, in the first room, with its swollen bronze belly and deeply incised decoration. And when, in a nearby case, you see a late neolithic pi, or jade disk--a circle of translucent greenish stone with a hole cut in the center, like a harvest moon rising, whose austerity reveals its maker's deep understanding of its material--the notion of progress in art seems more than normally fatuous.

Jade and bronze were the quintessential materials of archaic Chinese art, but ink and paper made it possible to run an empire on documents, and they replaced the stylus by the 2nd century A.D. It is notoriously difficult for Westerners to "get" Chinese calligraphy for the obvious reason that we can't read it and so can only admire it, more or less ignorantly, as abstract brush drawing. And yet its range of expressive power comes through marvelously in this show. At one extreme we see the almost chiseled formality of the 12th century Emperor Hui Tsung's script, with its flicking exactness of stroke; at the other, the blithely spontaneous notation of the 8th century Zen Buddhist monk Huai-su, who liked to work when drunk on rice wine. And somewhere in between is the long-arm forehand and backhand of the 16th century scholar-artist Chu Yun-ming, whose fierce cursive brush writing came to be revered as an example of moral probity in itself.

Wonderful things would continue to be produced for the Chinese imperial courts right down to the 19th century. In pottery, the innovation of blue glaze designs painted on a white ground belongs to the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1272-1368); but it reached its finest period under the later Ming Emperors in such objects as an early 15th century porcelain vase with a furious blue dragon galumphing around it, all its spikes and scales and fierce serpent rhythms contrasting with the suave, plump profile of the vase.

The official portrait approaches a kind of apogee in the Ming dynasty too, but the show contains some striking earlier examples. Witness the anonymous 13th century effigy of the Empress Chabi, wife of the first Yuan Emperor, Shih-tsu, better known to us as Kublai Khan. Did she look like that, this formidable dumpling? Who can know? But it's an image of detached power, the moon face framed in the magnificent red profiles of robe and towering formal headdress.

For delicacy and inventiveness, nothing exceeds the painting and ceramics of the Sung dynasty (960-1279). The show includes examples of Ju porcelain, the rarest and most esteemed type of Chinese ceramic: a lotus bowl and a dish with bodies as thin as fingernails, the absolute simplicity of their form etherialized by their pale turquoise glaze, a color so subtle that it seems to be emitting light rather than reflecting it.

As for the Sung painters, their renderings of mountain landscape--awesome in scale but without theatrical drama, the bare crags rising in swirls and convulsions of gray ink as the background to intensely seen trees and tiny human figures--achieved a relationship between notation and object that would make any draftsman, Eastern or Western, faint with envy. The blots, scribbles, hatchings, scumblings and flicks of the brush build up a world of microforms that seems at once abstract and dense with specific experience. No wonder Beijing wants all this back; no wonder Taipei is determined to keep it.