《幽居有伴》：在大都会博物馆重新爱上中国山水画

Looking Close at the Fragile Beauty of Chinese Painting

HOLLAND COTTER

翻译：邓妍、Nic Wong

Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art

《幽居有伴——中国画中的隐逸与交游》

吴历《墨井草堂消夏图》的细节，作于1679年。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

It always feels like early autumn in the Chinese painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lighting is warm but low; the décor, wheat-beige and nut-brown. Despite sparks of color, the ink-and-brush paintings are visually subdued; their images can be hard to read from even a short distance away.

在大都会艺术博物馆的国画馆里，总有一种初秋的感觉。灯光温暖而昏暗；装潢使用小麦米色和坚果棕色。即使有星星点点的色彩，但在视觉上，水墨画是十分克制的。即使近看也不容易读解。

And although the galleries hold the museum’s permanent collection of Chinese paintings, no picture stays for long. Compared with Western-style oil painting — a hardy, meat-and-potatoes, survivalist medium — Classical Chinese painting is fragile. Often done in ink on silk, it has two natural enemies: time and light. The danger is less that they will fade the ink than that they will darken the silk. Paintings depicting daylight scenes can end up looking twilight-dim.

虽然馆里展出的中国画是博物馆的永久收藏，但每一幅的展出时间都不太久。与坚固、凿实、易于保存的西方油画介质相比，中国古典绘画是脆弱的。通常用墨汁画在绢上的中国画有两大天敌：时间和光。它们的危险更多在于让绢变暗，而不是使墨水褪色。描绘白天场景的画最终可能看起来像是暮色降临。

Most of the 60 paintings in the museum’s current reinstallation, “Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art,” were never meant to have prolonged exposure. Some were conceived as album pages and kept between closed covers. Many in the form of scrolls were stored rolled up and brought out for occasional one-on-one viewing or as conversation starters at parties. (For reasons of conservation, the paintings on view now, which range from the 11th to the 21st century, will stay out until early January, and then be replaced by others.)

博物馆目前重新展出的《幽居有伴——中国画中的隐逸与交游》(Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art)的60幅画作，大部分是根本不适合长时间曝露在光线下的。有些做成了册页形式，有封面的保护。许多卷轴形式的画被卷起保存，偶尔拿出来进行私下的单独观赏，或在聚会上用它打开话题。（出于保护原因，现在展出的从11世纪到21世纪的绘画将保留到1月初，然后替换为其他画作。）

沈周《溪山秋色图》，约作于1490–1500年。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

And if reality of time, and time passing, is physically built into these objects, it is also a theme addressed by the art itself. Most of the paintings in “Companions in Solitude” are of landscapes, and many are identified not by place-name — mount such-and-such, lake so-and-so — but by season, as if changing weather were the real subject.

如果说时间和时间流逝的现实性被物理地构建到这些物体中，那么这也是艺术本身所表达的一个主题。《幽居有伴》中的大部分画作都是风景，很多不是按地名——某某山、某某湖——而是按季节来区分的，仿佛天气变化才是真正的主题.

In paintings like “Winter Landscape,” attributed to the 16th-century artist Jiang Song, or “Autumn Colors Among Streams and Mountains” by the great Ming dynasty master Shen Zhou, nature seems less to be depicted than hallucinated. It’s in motion, in a state of molecular dispersal. Mountains dissolve into clouds, earth into water as you look.

在16世纪画家蒋嵩的《冬景山水图》或明代大师沈周的《溪山秋色》等画作中，与其说是描绘自然，不如说是幻觉中的自然。它是动态的，处于一种分子弥散状态。当你观看的时候，山化为云，地化为水。

蒋嵩《冬景山水图》，16世纪，设色纸本水墨。 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Yet while many of these landscapes suggest the operation of transiency, they also embody a very specific cultural ideal: the possibility of escape from a crowded, relentlessly urbanized world to reclusion in the psychologically gentler, spiritually more spacious realm of Nature.

虽然许多这些景色暗示着时光稍纵即逝，但它们也体现了一种非常具体的文化理想：能够逃离拥挤、无情的城市化世界，隐居在心境更温和、精神更广阔的自然。

Reclusion had a long religious history in China, with Buddhist and Daoist monks and priests establishing hermitages, houses of contemplation, in remote sites. But in many of the landscapes at the Met, the longing for retreat also had a secular, class-based source. It was generated largely by an educated urban elite attached to the court or government, and eager to escape the crush of professional pressures and unpredictable politics.

在中国，隐居有着悠久的宗教历史，佛教僧侣和道教道士在偏僻的地方建立了隐居地，可以冥想的地方。但在大都会博物馆的许多山水画中，对隐退的渴望也有一个世俗的、基于阶级的根源。产生这种渴望的人主要属于宫廷府衙中受过教育的城市精英，他们渴望摆脱职业压力和不可预测的官场。

In some paintings, such as “Winter Landscape with Fisherman” by Shi Zhong, who lived during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the idea of reclusion feels theoretical. Images of fishermen and woodcutters going about their tasks correspond to those of shepherds in the pastoral tradition of European art. These fantasies of the carefree, nature-bound lives of the rural poor offer examples to be admired, but from a distance.

在一些画作中，例如生活在明朝（1368–1644年）的史忠的《雪景山水图》，隐居的想法只是理论上的。渔人和樵夫日常干活的画面，与欧洲艺术田园传统中的牧羊人形象遥相呼应。这些对农村穷人无忧无虑、亲近自然的生活的幻想，提供了让人崇尚的范例，但只能是远观。

史忠《雪景山水图》，15世纪末至16世纪初，纸本水墨。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

In other paintings, by contrast, the vision of immersion in nature feels immediate and personal. In a handscroll called “Summer Retreat in the Eastern Grove” by Wen Zhengming, one of the great Ming painter-calligraphers, the human protagonist, the seeker of retreat, is a mere speck in a panorama of hills, forests and lakes. And in “Solitary Traveler in the Mountains” by the 20th-century painter Fu Baoshi, you have to hunt hard to find the pilgrim-traveler. He’s little more than a knot of ink and paint half-absorbed into a spectacle of nature-as-energy.

相比之下，其他画作在视觉上让人即刻沉浸在大自然中并感到亲切。在明代书画大家文徵明的《东林避暑图》中，寻求隐居的人类主角只是山林湖泊全景中的一个小点。而在20世纪画家傅抱石的《游山图》中，你必须努力寻找，才能看到那个朝圣者。只花了一点点墨，他的身影像是被吸进了自然能量的奇观中。

Some artists were, indeed, wanderers — monks and mystics. Many, though, were city dwellers, and for them and the clients who acquired their works, living the reclusive life wasn’t a matter of just hitting the road with an all-weather hat and backpack. It required making practical arrangements. There was, for example, a long-running vogue for paintings that incorporated images of custom-built rustic retreats. These served as hermitages for certain high-minded urban refugees and as vacation properties for others.

有些艺术家确实是游子——僧侣道士和神秘主义者。然而，许多艺术家是城市居民，对于他们和获得他们作品的客户来说，过隐居的生活，不仅仅是穿戴能经风历雨的帽子和背包上路。它需要作出实际安排。例如，有一种长期流行的绘画风格，其中包含自建的乡村隐居地的图像。这些是某些高雅的远离喧嚣者的避难所，也是其他人的度假胜地。

文徵明《东林避暑图》，约作于1515年。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

《东林避暑图》的跋。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The breezy pavilion complex in Wu Li’s marvelous, God’s-eye-view 1679 scroll called “Whiling Away the Summer at the Ink-Well Thatched Hut,” looks suitable for either purpose, though the artist ended up not staying there. Two years after he finished the painting he had himself baptized as a Christian, then ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He died doing missionary work in bustling Shanghai.

《墨井草堂消夏图》中的凉亭建筑群均适用于这两种用途，尽管艺术家最终没有留在那里。这是吴历在1679年创作的一幅上帝视角的奇观卷轴。完成这幅画两年后，他受洗成为基督徒，然后被任命为罗马天主教神父。他在繁华的上海传教时去世。

And reclusion wasn’t necessarily a rural or solitary condition. If you had the desire, and the means, you could bring the country into the city by building your own walled mini-Eden. Wen Zhengming was born in Suzhou, and after taking a stab at making it big in Beijing, and failing, he went back home. Suzhou was famed for its private gardens, and he took one of them, known as the “Garden of the Inept Administrator,” as a subject for series of extraordinary architectural paintings, one of which is on view. That garden still exists in Suzhou, but much changed. It lives on in something like its original form in Wen’s art. (The Met’s Astor Court, around which the painting galleries wind, is based on a section of another garden in that city.)

隐居不一定要在农村或闭关。如果你有愿望和手段，你可以通过建造自己的带围墙的迷你伊甸园，将乡村带入城市。文徵明出生在苏州，曾尝试在北京大展宏图，失败后回到家乡。苏州以私家园林闻名，他以其中的拙政园为题材，创作了一系列非凡的建筑画作，其中一幅在本展中展出。拙政园仍在苏州，但已经发生了很大的变化。在文徵明的画中保留了它的某种最初形式。（被大都会画廊环绕的阿斯特庭院，便是基于苏州另一座园林的局部设计的。）

As for solitude, reclusion didn’t strictly require it. In China, painting, like poetry — the two are closely linked through calligraphy — was an inherently social art, to be shared. Get-togethers of like-minded creatives were common, and some became the stuff of legend. One of the most famous took place in 353 A.D. when the artist-scholar Wang Xizhi threw a party for some 40 professedly loner friends at a retreat called the Orchid Pavilion.

而隐居不见得一定要避世。绘画和诗歌一样——二者通过书法紧密相连——从根本上是一种社交艺术，是用来分享的。志同道合的创作者聚在一起的场面很常见，有的本身也成了传奇。其中最著名的一场聚会发生在公元353年，当时文人艺术家王羲之在一个叫兰亭的隐居地宴请了约40位喜欢独来独往的朋友。

文徵明《拙政园图诗》的细节，作于1551年。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Wine flowed; so did poetry; and so, finally, did autumn-tinged reflections on time passing and mortality. Wang wrote up the event; thanks to copyists, his account went viral, and the Orchid Pavilion Gathering became an evergreen subject for painting, as seen in two quite different examples at the Met, one a tightly executed 1699 album page by Lu Han, the other a many-feet-long handscroll, dated 1560, by Qian Gu.

他们纵酒吟诗，最后在一派秋色之中反思了时光的流逝和人的生死。王羲之挥毫记载了这一聚会，并经过他人的临摹流传开来。而兰亭聚会也成了一个永恒的绘画主题，大都会展中就有两个范例，分别是陆汉作于1699年的一套手法缜密的图册，以及钱谷作于1560年的一幅数英尺长的手卷。

In general, scholarly confabs like this were all-male affairs, though the Met show, expertly shaped and annotated by Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, the museum’s associate curator of Chinese painting and calligraphy, clears space for the female image, though almost all the work in this section is by men. A roundabout exception comes in an album dated 1799, titled “Famous Women.” Its painter, Gai Qi, was male, but his images were based on poems by the female scholar Cao Zhenxiu, all dedicated to historical female heroes — warriors, artists, poets and calligraphers like herself. The album was, in fact, commissioned by Cao.

这种博学雅聚基本上是男人的事，尽管在大都会博物馆中国书画副馆长史耀华(Joseph Scheier-Dolberg)的精心编排注释下，该展览为女性形象腾出了空间，但几乎所有参展作品都属于男性。一个迂回的例外是1799年的《列女图》册。画师改琦是男性，但他笔下的形象是基于女性文人曹贞秀的诗歌，这些诗都是为历史上的女英雄而作的，包括女性的武士、艺术家、以及像她一样的诗人和书法家。事实上，该画册正是曹贞秀委托创作的。

And what, in the end, is the takeaway from this show, which is, technically, not a show at all, but a permanent collection rehang? For me, there are several. The most obvious one is the reminder that “Companions in Solitude” gives of how beautiful, varied, and demanding to mind and eye alike the Chinese landscape painting tradition is. So fine-grained are its formal beauties and subtly-stated its themes that it’s an art easy to simply pass by, until you stop, and look and fall in love. “Companions in Solitude” is an opportunity to fall in love with it over again.

这场展览严格来讲并非展览，而是一次永久藏品的重新展出，那么，它给人的最大收获是什么呢？对我来说，收获有以下几点。最显而易见的就是，《幽居有伴》提醒了我们，中国山水画的传统是多么美丽、丰富，多么需要心灵和眼睛的欣赏。它的形式美是如此精致，主题是如此微妙，以至于它是一种很容易被忽视的艺术，直到你停下脚步，仔细审视，并着迷不已。《幽居有伴》是一个重新爱上山水画的机会。

改琦的《列女》基于学者曹贞秀的诗歌创作而成。METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

It also gives some sense of how rich the Met’s holdings are: 14 pieces in the rehang are being exhibited for the first time, with more surprises promised in the next rotation. And histories of familiar works have been reconsidered and updated. The attribution of the monumental handscroll “Dwellings Among Mountains and Clouds,” once thought to be by Gong Xian, one of the Eight Masters of Nanjing and a late-in-life recluse, is now being reconsidered by scholars. Do their questions make the painting any less forebodingly thunderous? No.

它也说明了大都会博物馆的藏品有多么丰富：14件作品首次展出，下一轮展出保证还会有更多惊喜。而且，一些家喻户晓的作品，其历史也得到了重新审视和更新。不朽的手卷《云山隐居图》的作者曾被认为是金陵八家之一、晚年隐居的龚贤，现在学者们正在重新思考它出自何人之手。这些疑问是否让这幅画缺失了几分气势万钧的震撼力？并没有。

And resonances between past and present are striking. In the aftermath of Covid lockdown, solitude, ideal and real, feels like a more complicated condition than it once was. The same is true of communion, now shaped by new technological interfaces and continuing hesitations. At a time of acute environmental consciousness, the terrestrial vision projected by Chinese landscape painting — of the world, not as a collection of disparate, disposable material parts, but as a single, responsive organism — has immediate pertinence.

昨天与今天之间的共鸣十分引人注目。在新冠疫情的封锁之后，孤独、理想和现实之间的关系似乎比以往更加复杂。在新科技交互与持续疑虑的影响下，人与人的交流也变得如此。在一个保持敏锐环保意识的时代，中国山水画所反映的人间愿景——世界并非由全不相干、用完即弃的物质集合而成，而是一个独立、灵敏的有机体——具有直接的关联性。

So does a principle — call it physics, call it Daoist — that seems to inform almost every image in this show: The only thing that never changes is the fact of change itself, a hard but oddly consoling certainty to carry through fall into winter.

一种似乎贯穿于全展所有作品的原则——说是物理学说也好，道家思想也罢——也是如此：唯一不变的是变化本身，从秋到冬，这是一种无情但也让人奇异地感到安心的确定性。