The Eternal Dance of Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting

In line for tickets at The Met’s Great Hall, I spotted the massive calligraphy of Taiwanese artist Tong Yang-Tze, a 2024 museum commission whose broad brush strokes leap across the canvas. In “Go where it is right, stop when one must” (行於其所當行，止於其不得不止), the character for “move forward or go” (行) appears twice — once with greater legibility in the strokes, as the poem starts, and then once again in a lighter, more abstract style, in the middle of the poem. The work references the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi, whose poem feels apropos for any contemporary creative practice: Move forward with your practice when it feels right, and stop when you need to.

“Stones from other mountains can refine our jade” (他山之石可以攻玉), another monumental work by Tong, draws on the Shijing, or Book of Odes, a 9th-century BCE work that reminds us hundred of years later about the value of accepting and celebrating talents and perspectives from other countries and lands. In both pieces, Tong combines regular script, a largely legible rendering of the characters, with semi-cursive script. The result combines two means of expression, reflecting the moral of the poem.

These pieces are part of Tong’s exhibition Dialogue, in which poetry and calligraphy fly and merge together. They complement the concurrent show The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection. The latter includes 160 works that contain these three artistic forms, which frequently interweave in East Asian aesthetics.

“The Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals” is a gorgeous set of painted screens from the 17th century that portrays courtly poets — only five of them women — deemed important at the time. It’s a good example of the three perfections in one: The painting comes from the Studio of Kano Takanobu, while the calligraphy is by Konoe Nobutada, and the poems include one waka, or court poem, by Ki no Tsurayuki:

Cherry blossoms scatter
in the breezes not chilly,
a type of snow flurries
unknown to the heavens
continue to fall.

In “Scenes and Calligraphic Excerpts from The Tale of Genji,” another set of screens depicts vignettes from The Tale of Genji, an 11th-century classic and novel from Marasaki Shikibu. The paintings likely came from different artists in the Tosa School of painting, founded in the 14th century, and the screens include decorated paper inscribed with passages from the book. The backdrop of gold powder and flakes depicts a natural landscape of mountains and water. 

In today’s digital and cinematic media, poetry, images, and typography all intertwine. It’s enriching to look back on early examples of how these many forms — which are often treated as separate disciplines — can come together in both an artistic and communications context. Poems from centuries ago can stand in dialogue with painters speaking to their contemporaries, and calligraphy serves as a bit of a bridge between them.

My favorite piece on view is Itō Ryūgai’s “Handscroll of Tyrannical Government” (1920), which references a Chinese idiom — a tyrannical government is more fierce than a tiger (苛政猛于虎). It comes from the story of Confucius meeting a woman who chose to live in the wilderness despite having lost her entire family to tigers. The scroll portrays life in the quiet mists, courtly life, and armed soldiers enforcing class by collecting rice from poor villagers. It’s perhaps as true in the early 20th century as it is today, and as it was in Confucius’s time some 2,500 years ago.

The Great Hall Commission: Tong Yang-Tze, Dialogue continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Ave, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through April 8. The exhibition was conceived by the artist in consultation with Lesley Ma, the Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.

The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 3. The exhibition was curated by John Carpenter, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art, and Monika Bincsik, Diane and Arthur Abbey Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts, with Tim Zhang, research associate, Department of Asian Art.