Enjoy the summery scenes on fan paintings from the Chinese and Japanese reserve collection.
A garden rock takes up the key role in the composition of this fan painting. The four aesthetic qualities of rocks – thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling – are highly regarded among Chinese scholars, who have collected, appreciated, and painted rocks for over 1000 years. A rock is not only a garden miniature to the grand peaks in nature, but also an expression of the owner’s personality. As a balance to the ‘bony’ texture of the rock, the lily and the red dragonfly are painted in the renowned ‘boneless’ style (see also [EA1964.234]), in which the soft touch of a brush lends an almost transparent effect to the fragile petals and wings.
Vainker, Shelagh, Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2000), no. 2.26 on p. 230, illus. p. 231 fig. 2.26
Objects are sometimes moved to a different location. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis. Contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular object on display, or would like to arrange an appointment to see an object in our reserve collections.
Objects from past exhibitions may have now returned to our stores or a lender. Click into an individual object record to confirm whether or not an object is currently on display. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis, so please contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular Eastern Art object.
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