Artful bliss in the garden of blankness

In 1971 Maxwell Hearn entered a museum by the back door. What he found inside so fascinated him that he has never quite left the world

The word metaphor constantly surfaces during a conversation with Maxwell Hearn, chairman of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"Imagine yourself walking down the pathway of our scholar's garden, with the ever-changing view evocative of the intimate experience of unrolling a long hand scroll," he says. "The scenery - mountains, rivers, thickets - is revealed not all at once, but bit by bit."

Hearn is sitting in the museum's second-floor Astor Garden, named after the late Brooke Astor, the American socialite and philanthropist whose childhood days in Shanghai led her to bankroll the construction of the space. Modeled on a typical scholar's garden from imperial China, it is complete with a moon gate and wooden latticed windows, rocks and bamboos, and what Hearn calls "a half pavilion" that rises horizontally from a wall as blank as a piece of paper. The other half, and the world beyond it, is left out of the composition, consigned to the realm of imagination.

Sunlight suffuses the space from the window roof above.

"The idea of a garden took hold of me in 1974, when one day I climbed up into the rafters and discovered that there was this hidden light well," says Hearn, who was then the curatorial assistant to Wen C. Fong, the Chinese American historian who for many years was the Met's consultative chairman for Asian art.

"By that time we already had the furniture," he says, referring to the adjacent room spartanly filled with a wooden settee, a long side table and a couple of chairs from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), a period of consummate minimalism. "If you look at Chinese paintings, furniture is often depicted as being placed inside the gardens. This interaction between the indoor and outdoor is greatly valued by ancient Chinese, and is something that we intended to create with this garden."

Unsurprisingly, paintings have always been Hearn's reference point.

From top: Maxwell Hearn with his wife, Vera Michaels Hearn, on the Great Wall in 1986; 1980 Bronze Age of China Symposium: Laurence Sickman, Wen Fong and Maxwell Hearn (from left); a Chinese artist featured in the Ink Art exhibition in 2014 has his own face overwritten with Chinese characters, as a commentary on cultural labeling. Photos provided to China Daily

"Symbolism abounds in this place. The gray tiled floor, handmade by artisan-workers from China, reminds me of the clouds, through which the mountain peaks would rise, along a misty band of water," says Hearn, who is behind the current Met show Streams and Mountains without End: Landscape Traditions of China.

"The garden is a way to give people a very physical experience of what they see in two dimensions in a painting. Like the painting, it's a world in miniature."

Hearn, who grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, is no stranger to the sense of awe induced by nature's magnificence, a feeling the Chinese sought to convey with their atmospheric scrolls.

"I remember climbing the mountains as a boy and looking down from the peak: the city looked so tiny and men so insignificant. Later, when I gazed at the little thatched hut tucked in mountain folds in a typical ancient Chinese landscape, the link was unmistakable."

With a geologist mother who collected local artists as well as minerals, and a father who decorated their home walls with the Chinese painting and calligraphy works he was given while with the occupation army in Japan after World War II, Hearn had early exposure to art. Yet he remained agnostic until one semester break, as a business student from Yale, he paid a chance visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

"It wasn't any particular painting, but the whole museum with such a comprehensive display of Chinese art. It made me aware of the existence of a culture which I knew nothing about. I returned to Yale to take a course in Chinese art."

One course eventually led to a change of major. Before graduating Hearn was already an art history student with an honors paper on Chinese scholar gardens. He would go back to the Nelson-Atkins Museum, where the biggest metaphor of his life and career awaited.

"At Yale, I learned that you could actually contact a museum and ask to see things in storage. So I wrote to Laurence Sickman, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum and a Chinese art historian who wrote my textbooks."

There was no reply. So on a Monday morning in the summer of 1971 Hearn stopped in front of the museum's great bronze door, having driven from Salt Lake City on his way to Indiana, where the art student with no job in sight had planned to work on a friend's farm.

"Back then, I didn't know that museums are closed on Mondays. But before leaving, I told myself that I should at least walk around and see if there was a back door."

Indeed there was one. Hearn pushed the buzzer. A little window opened and a man popped his head out.

"Before I knew it, I was ushered down the long corridor to the director's office," Hearn says. The next day Sickman personally unrolled for him the 11th century landscape painting he had asked in his letter to see.

"Then I thought: 'This is it. Being a museum curator and able to handle works of art is the most remarkable job in this world.'"

Over the past 40 years Hearn has repeated that movement of Sickman numerous times, each unrolling presenting its own revelations.

In 1971 the new convert Hearn then wrote to Wen Fong, the teacher of his teacher at Yale, and was granted a meeting a couple of months later.

"I remember him walking in in tennis white with a racket over his shoulder. Half an hour into our conversation, he asked, 'How would you like to work at the Metropolitan Museum?'"

Hearn reluctantly took the job - in the early '70s the Met's Chinese collection comprised mainly of a handful of ancient ceramics and Buddhist sculptures. But that would undergo big change, of which Hearn has been both a witness and an agent. Today the museum has 21 galleries of Chinese art.

Upon the completion of its Chinese painting galleries in 1991, John M. Crawford Jr., who in the 1950s had formed what Hearn called the most important private ensemble of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the West, came in for a look from his home across the street.

"I remember him saying: 'At last, a space big enough to hold my collection,'" Hearn says.

In the intervening years Hearn also learned Chinese, both modern and classical. However, the raw experience of looking at a wildly executed piece of ancient Chinese calligraphy, of feeling the strength of every stroke while not knowing what it exactly means, has stayed with him.

He tapped into that feeling as a curator, first with a 1970s show that juxtaposed calligraphic works from both in and outside of China, and then with an uncompromisingly contemporary one titled Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, in 2014.

"Wen Fong is a great tennis player. He talked about calligraphy the same way you might talk about an athletic performance by Roger Federer. In both cases, it's about trying to liberate yourself while trusting your own hand at a certain amount - the combination of physical training, mental focus and spontaneity," he says, trying to explain the sense of thrill someone who is not Chinese might feel looking at a work of Chinese calligraphy.

"A skier navigating the courses down a mountain slope might go through the same kind of excitement a calligrapher experiences with his brush," Hearn says.

"Westerners who know about action painting, about gesture and speed, about figure-ground relationship, about positive and negative spaces can understand calligraphy, for all the elements are there," he says, linking the millennia-old art tradition with influential abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

With the Ink Art exhibition Hearn has taken one step further. The artists featured are Chinese who worked with everything from ink and brush to sculpture, photography, print and new media. If there's anything in common, it's that they continue the tradition by subverting it. In one example, an artist had his own face overwritten with inky Chinese words, as a commentary on and protest against the cultural labeling he has been subjected to in the US.

"In China today there are many amateur calligraphers and painters who are very talented. But when I did the show, I wasn't simply interested in how that artistic tradition is being sustained, but rather, how it has been challenged by those who seek to create a new relationship with the past, and to elevate the discussion beyond the level of techniques."

Hearn himself practiced Chinese calligraphy, a process that has "taught me something about the control going to the artful use of a brush".

"Ancient Chinese painting celebrated the concept zhuo - studied clumsiness - as a beguiling form of sophistication. I'm naturally zhuo since I'm left-handed. However, trying to wield a brush did give me a deeper understanding of the calligraphic nature of ancient Chinese painting.

"In the West we looked at how naturalistic the tree looks, and how light and show models form, whereas in China people are concerned not just with how natural the tree looks, but how vital the lines are. Life is instilled into the depicted subject by the energy of the brushwork, which intensifies your experience of the tree. And ultimately, one experiences the way the tree was painted."

Hearn likens the highly individualistic touch with an autograph, in which you delve deep into to glimpse the artist's inner world.

"To appreciate an ancient Chinese painting you must put yourself in the mind of the artist."

That is where the country's long and tumultuous history comes in. One group of artists Hearn has studied carefully are those who lived in transitional periods, through dynastic changes that were almost always enabled by bloody warfare.

"From the fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, Western history is also peppered with drastic moments that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. But how did it affect art? You don't see it the way you do following the demise of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and the rise of Yuan (1271-1368) in the 13th century. That's because in the West, artists historically were craftsmen, hired hands for kings and popes, while in ancient China they were cultural leaders and politicians involved in the process of governing."

This political dimension to the artists informed their works, Hearn says, pointing to the cloud-wreathed mountain peaks and a little hermitage down low, in a painting from late 14th-century China. The gathering thunderclouds hinted at the political storm that in reality would soon overwhelm the artist - the painter, Wang Meng, died in prison after running afoul of the emperor - and the reclusive dwelling stood for a haven.

A desolate landscape might well be a reflection of society, and therefore a metaphorical form of protest. Yet more often the artists chose to cling to their inner poetry by retreating to a dreamed-up ideal, at least on paper.

"This tendency to withdraw into the inner world provides the emotional undercurrent to a large part of ancient Chinese works," Hearn says. "In fact, one of the things that has drawn me to Chinese art is the interest of the practitioners not in exploring the extended world around, but the infinite world of the mind and the heart. Self-cultivation - that's what really matters to a member of the literati who most likely were well versed in painting and calligraphy."

One place for self-cultivation is inside a carefully conceived Ming Dynasty scholar's garden.

"The Ming court had a powerful navy that sailed to the east coast of Africa, but you don't see a painting from that period in which a powerful general was planting a flag on a beach. They prefer to be seen in their own garden. Above all, they want to be remembered not as bureaucrats or governors of the state, but as gentlemen who understood the leisure practice of painting, calligraphy, music and chess."

Hearn sees the construction of the Ming section of the Great Wall as the era's most potent metaphor for a garden retreat.

"They probably saw no need to go beyond this vast, perfect garden," says Hearn, referring to a shut-door policy partly blamed for the country's decline in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Back to his own garden at the Met, Hearn said one thing he cannot help noticing is that while Chinese visitors tend to walk along the pathway skirting around the center of the garden, most of the Westerners step right into the middle.

"For ancient Chinese, the most valuable thing is the empty space," he says, evoking the concept of liubai, a crucial aesthetic principle that translates into "retaining the blankness (for it is imbued with meaning)".

These days, once or twice a day, Hearn walks through Central Park, on whose northern side the museum sits. "I'm very aware of the changing scenery of nature," says Hearn, in his late 60s.

"Both the Chinese and the Japanese celebrate the transient and the ephemeral, which has become a poignant part of my life. When one grows old one cherishes these things."

The lapse of time has certainly changed a lot. Having perused so many scrolls, Hearn is no longer conscious of the red seals stamped on a painting by those through whose hands the work of art passed over centuries.

But certain things remain unchanged, such as a passion for learning.

"Fong often reminded me, 'Don't forget the young Mike Hearn who comes and gets inspired by what he sees.' That's why I'm here."

In 2017 Hearn's department teamed up with the Chinese Ministry of Culture for the blockbuster show Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin & Han Dynasties (221 BC-AD 220). For the near future Hearn is considering mounting a series of smaller exhibitions that dive deeply into a single idea.

"In both cases, our commitment is to exhibitions with strong scholarly value, which we offer to our 500,000 visitors."

Looking back, Hearn said that when he walked around to knock on a back door of the Nelson-Atkins Museum 48 years ago, he had no idea about the back door, or houmen, being one of the most used metaphors in Chinese language.

"Today I know it means 'to play unfair and get something through bribing or personal connections'. But that's not the back door as my favorite metaphor. Mine is about the road not taken. I could have followed my father to become a businessman but I got distracted from that. I feel so lucky that I did. You've got to find your back door because that's your own door."

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Maxwell Hearn, chairman of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Photos by Gao Tianpei / China Daily

(China Daily Global 06/05/2019 page16)