The Chinese way of appreciating a painting is often expressed by the words du hua,”to read a painting.” How does one do that? Because art is a visual language, words alone cannot adequately convey its expressive dimension. In this lecture, Mike Hearn visually analyzes select paintings and calligraphies from the encyclopedic collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to elucidate what makes each a masterpiece.

Spanning a thousand years of Chinese art from the 8th through the 17th century, the presentation examines multiple layers of meaning — style, technique, symbolism, past traditions, and the artist’s personal circumstances — in the treatment of landscapes, flowers, birds, figures, religious subjects, and calligraphies in order to illuminate the main goal of every Chinese artist: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but also its inner essence.