White-Rock Shallows

Pat Suet-Bik Hui, Painting with Poem by Wang Wei, 1995

This is one of the paintings on show in the Ashmolean at the moment, in a small exhibition called The Three Perfections. 

'Hui has inscribed this painting with a Tang-era (618-907) poem that transforms her seemingly abstract streaks of blue into the image of a flowing river: Clear and shallow rapids formed out of white rocks / Green reeds grasp reaching for the sky / Families dotted along both banks / Silk rustling as it's washed beneath the bright moon.'

The curators don't say, but this is one of Wang Wei's poems from the celebrated Wang River Sequence, which I first mentioned here back in 2006. David Hinton calls it 'White-Rock Shallows'. The poems are not purely landscape description - here we see people by the river washing silk. The second slightly confusing line suggests rushes 'grasping' for the sky. Alternative translations include: 'green rushes once could be grasped', 'green reeds almost near enough to touch'  and (Hinton) 'green reeds past prime for harvest.'

Pat Suet-Bik Hui (b. 1943) gave a set these paintings to the Chinese art expert Michael Sullivan, who bequeathed then to the Ashmolean. In addition to paintings with calligraphy, Hui made images without words; one, called 'Landscape', consists of a blue wash for the sky and a green wash for the land, separated by a lavender horizon. Hui has lived for many years in North America but originally studied in Hong Kong under the traditional ink painter Lui Shou Kwan. They were introduced by another of his pupils, Wucius Wong, who specialises in landscapes set within geometric structures (see, for example, the Met's Reminiscing About the River). The Ashmolean has a painting of his called Autumn Feelings which incorporates two leaves and splashes of red and brown ink. There were trees in Oxford this week that are starting to turn and paint the ground with fallen leaves.