Exquisite Moments: West Lake & Southern Song Art
精致的瞬间：西湖和南宋艺术

“New York’s big fall show of Chinese painting is installed in a very small space: two galleries at the China Institute…But in this case square footage doesn’t matter. Scale and quality do. Most of the 40 or so paintings in ‘Exquisite Moments: West Lake and Southern Song Art’ are themselves diminutive, and tailor made for an intimate setting. And they include first-class works, some of them textbook classics, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Cleveland Museum of Art.”

“An image like this, if viewed closely, has a conceptual rigor not often associated with pretty-pretty Southern Song art. And a study of the Song dynastic aesthetic in light of the politics of its time can yield complex and often unflattering results. But to conduct such examinations means interrupting the dream, so disarming in its apparent fragility, so invested in evanescence. ‘‘Exquisite Moments’ doesn’t try to do so. Instead, it maps the precise coordinates of a Lotusland long thought to have vanished but now tucked away at China Institute. You’d be crazy not to visit it.”