“Paradise Found” – Wen Zhengming

China Daiy offers a comprehensive essay on the painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) titled “Paradise Found.” Wen Zhengming was noted for “the public perception of him as a man of high moral standards who disavowed the seedy side of politics in favor of a secluded existence in the garden abode he built for himself.” In the tradition of reclusion, however, “Wen Zhengming’s self-imposed exile, as those orbiting around him might wish to call it, was lived out not in sheer harshness, but amid the many enjoyable things that Jiangnan had to offer, including its spring.” Jiangnan was a region of the southern Yangtze River Delta.

A clear inspiration for both Wen Zhengming’s artistic depiction of this paradise but also of the life of deliberate reclusion is the famous hermit Tao Chien or Tao Yuanming (365-427). In a fable, Tao Yuanming described Peach Blossom Spring as an idealized paradise . Wen Zhengming evokes this paradise in paintings of contemporary Xiaoxiang, as the region came to be known. In his paintings, he, too, presents “a place of reclusion and longing in view of its natural beauty.”

URL; https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/06/WS6598b0b9a3105f21a507adcd_1.html

Edward A. Burger’s “The Mountain Path” – 3 conversations

Three video conversations with The Mountain Path film director Edward A. Burger. The conversations followed public screenings of the film.

1. Video recording of the conversation between Edward A. Burger and John Kieschnick, professor of Buddhist Studies at Stanford University.
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAyOdj_ZIjI

2. Video recording of the conversation between Edward A. Burger and Buddhist monk Rev. Heng Sure, Vice-President for Religious Affairs and Dean of Translation and Language Studies at Dharma Realm Buddhist University.
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAVpO1ZqEnA

3. Video recordingof a conversation between Edward A. Burger and Bill Porter, moderated by Gaetano Kazuo Maida, Buddhist Film Foundation Executive Director/Chief Programmer. Sponsoredby the California Film Institute and the Buddhist Film Foundation .
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZvKpeKikBM

“The Mountain Path” (film), by Edward A. Burger

Edward A. Burger, producer of Amongst White Clouds 2005), has now produced The Mountain Path (2021). The earlier film documented Burger’s visit to the Zhongnan Mountains of China in search of Zen Buddhist hermits. The recent film uses footage from the first film with a new focus: “My search for a hermit Zen master in China.” Produced by One Mind Productions, 2021. Two+ minute trailer.

URL: https://vimeo.com/613866673

Hermits in Chinese Art: art exhibition

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is presenting a year-long exhibition entitled “Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art.” The exhibition centers on Chinese paintings featuring hermits and hermits in natural settings.

From the Metropolitan website:

“This exhibition will explore the twin themes of solitude and togetherness in Chinese art. For more than two thousand years, reclusion—removing oneself from society—has been presented as the ideal condition for mental cultivation and transcending worldly troubles. At the same time, communion with like-minded people has been celebrated as essential to the human experience. This choice, to be alone or to be together, has been central to the lives of thinkers and artists, and Chinese art abounds with images of figures who pursued both paths—as well as those who wove them together in complex and surprising ways. Companions in Solitude, presented in two rotations, will bring together more than 120 works of painting, calligraphy, and decorative arts that illuminate this choice—depictions of why and how people have sought space from the world or attempted to bridge the divide between themselves and others. In the wake of 2020, a year that has isolated us physically but connected us virtually in unprecedented ways, this exploration of premodern Chinese reclusion and communion will invite meditation on the fracture and facture of human connection in our own time.

Rotation one: July 31, 2021–January 9, 2022
Rotation two: January 31, 2022–August 14, 2022″

URL: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/companions-in-solitude