Course: The Metropolitan Museum of Art > Unit 1
Lesson 7: NatureCongyi, Cloudy Mountains
Met curator Maxwell K. Hearn on emptiness in Fang Congyi’s Cloudy Mountains, second half of 14th century.
Fang Congyi, a Daoist priest from Jiangxi, traveled extensively in the north before settling down at the seat of the Orthodox Unity Daoist church, the Shangqing Temple on Mount Longhu (Dragon Tiger Mountain), Jiangxi province. Imbued with Daoist mysticism, he painted landscapes that "turned the shapeless into shapes and returned things that have shapes to the shapeless."
According to Daoist geomantic beliefs, a powerful life energy pulsates through mountain ranges and watercourses in patterns known as longmo (dragon veins). In Cloudy Mountains, the painter's kinetic brushwork, wound up as if in a whirlwind, charges the mountains with an expressive liveliness that defies their physical structure. The great mountain range, weightless and dematerialized, resembles a dragon ascending into the clouds.
View this work on metmuseum.org.
Are you an educator? Here's a related lesson plan. For additional educator resources from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, visit "Find an Educator Resource.”
. Created by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Want to join the conversation?
- The artist who originally painted the scroll did a beautiful and a well done job.
Did they make a lot of scrolls like this one?
How long would it take the artist finish one scroll?(7 votes) - Exceptional video, but I would ask if what is ahead of us is just behind the mist?(4 votes)
- Different with realistic arts, Chinese paintings always have this "mist", its kind of an artistic conception, it's called "意境" in Chinese, you can never know what's really behind that mist or what was the author's idea, you can have your own imaging in your head and there's no right or wrong on this.(4 votes)
- the scroll has almost a poetic feel to it. the mountains are highlighting how small we really are, and the mysterious fading at the end is most interesting to me, not only art wise, but also symbolically. although, i do wonder...was this painting done on cloth, or paper? if either, what kind?(2 votes)
- Chinese landscape paintings were always on silk scrolls, meant to be unrolled gradually so as to get a sense of movement and space: movement, that is, of you moving through the spacial landscape. (see0:15).(2 votes)
- I miss videos about the Ming vases...were they not one of a kind? shouldn't they be considered in this Art course?(1 vote)
- There are many red stamps on the scroll. Why did they stamp them in the middle of the picture (1:48) instead of onto the side -- don't the red letters interrupt the unfolding scene and distract from the message? Isn't it ironic that a Buddhist message of transience is corrupted by symptoms of consumerism?(1 vote)