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This is a small fan painting by the painter Liang Kai
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done in the first half of the thirteenth century. Now it's mounted as an album leaf
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and depicts a poet strolling on the marshy land,
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across the river is a little embankment,
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and a few sketched lines of a distant peak.
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It's a very light, very airy composition. The subject matter is quite conventional,
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but the way it is treated here is very unusual. Many paintings of this time used lots of empty space,
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but if you look at it closely, there's a diagonal across the middle of the composition.
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The unpainted part is actually solid; it's not just mist, it's actually a massive boulder behind it.
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I think that there's a metaphorical dimension to it,
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that reflects the psychological weight
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of the stroller beneath it. This kind of composition
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is very often associated with the poet Qu Yuan,
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a major court minister very devoted to the nation and to the ruler, but because of some slander he was exiled
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and he drowned himself in the river to show his loyalty.
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And Liang Kai used this overhanging,
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massive rock
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above him to show his emotional state. Liang Kai
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may feel some affinity with the ancient poet. He was
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briefly a court painter, and then something happened. He left his prestigious position at court
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and went to live in a Buddhist monastery and he painted there very much in the Buddhist idea
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of an illusory nature of a phenomenon. He's playing on the idea about the deceptive nature
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of what can be seen on the surface,
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and the reality may be behind the clouds, behind the mist.