Met Museum gets major Song painting

Oscar Tang, a Chinese-American philanthropist, has given the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a major work that's been called one of the most important paintings in existence for offering a view into 10th century Chinese art.

The 1,000-year-old painting, Riverbank, is a rare survivor from 10th century China, with very few paintings of that era still in existence today. Tang, a former investment banker and longtime trustee of the Met, originally purchased the painting from prominent Chinese art collector C.C. Wang in 1997.

"This is the very best painting, like the Mona Lisa," Wang told The New York Times 20 years ago when Tang purchased the painting and promised it to the Met.

"I want it to be recognized all over the world."

Watching The Riverbank go to the Met, he said, was "like seeing my daughter married to a good husband".

"This was a piece that perhaps was the most important painting in [Wang's] collection, and this is something that the Met Museum really wanted to have, to highlight in its collection," Tang told China Daily.

"It is one of the earliest examples of monumental landscape painting, which is one of the major forms of Chinese painting, so it's extremely important. The details in the painting - which you have to get close up to examine very carefully - are just magnificent. We're very happy to have this at the museum," he said.

The painting is one of the largest silk hanging scrolls to survive from early Chinese art and larger than anything in either of the palace museums in Beijing or Taipei, said Maxwell Hearn, chairman of the Met's department of Asian art.

"This is one of the great opportunities for us to tell the story of landscape's evolution, from the 10th century right down to the present. Without this painting we lose a whole chapter in that history," he said.

Riverbank is an example of landscape painting's transition from the use of blue-green in the Tang Dynasty (618-906) to the monochromatic style of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Artists began using brushstrokes called cun or cunfa that used different techniques of dotting and texture, according to Hearn.

"I think it's arguably one of the most important Chinese paintings that exist," said Tang.

"Here in the West we're very familiar with the basic elements of Western civilization, but Chinese and Asian civilization needs to have a platform so that the West can appreciate the extent to which Chinese civilization had developed two millenniums ago," he said.

Tang said his donation expressed his "tremendous confidence" in the Met Museum, which has been undergoing budget and restructuring challenges. Museum director Thomas Campbell reportedly resigned under pressure last month over concerns about the museum's finances, though he is staying on through June.

Tang, who moved to the US from Shanghai when he was 11 years old and built a formidable career in investment banking, is a longtime trustee of the museum, supporting major projects including the creation of the Frances Young Tang Gallery, named for his wife, who died of cancer in 1992.

"I was educated here and then built a career in the investment business," he said, "but having been successful in terms of accumulating wealth, I think I want to use that wealth as best I can, to build institutions that support Chinese art and culture as a way to present that to the Western public."

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com