Painting Apart from the World: Monks and Scholars of the Ming and Qing Dynasties

Shitao, Paintings from the Poems of Huang Yanlu, ca. 1701-1702, Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Painting Apart from the World presents more than one hundred masterpieces of classical Chinese painting brought together by the collector Ho Iu-kwong (1907–2006) before donating them to the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2018. Shown in Europe for the first time, these paintings and calligraphies were created by the greatest masters of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties. Produced during a pivotal moment of dynastic shift, they show Chinese painters’ representations of the sages and poets withdrawing from the world to live in the forests and mountains.

The exhibition website includes helpful explanations of the genres represented.