In the Garden of Satisfaction. The Chinese Painting Collection at the Museum Angewandte Kunst

Chinese painting has many faces: landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, genre scenes or portraits. For a long time, a distinction has been made between commissioned works executed by professional painters and those created by educated “amateurs”, which have always been held in far higher esteem than the former. These “literati paintings” have many manifestations, but are basically characterised by a remarkable continuity and a restrained, quiet language. Not infrequently, color is dispensed with completely, and the world appears in them solely in delicate traces of ink. For the viewer, such works offer great challenges. And so it is hardly surprising that, unlike e.g. Chinese porcelain, paintings from China only found their way into Western collections much later and to a far lesser extent.

At the Museum Angewandte Kunst, which has an extensive Asian collection dating back to the late 19th century, Chinese painting remained a niche topic for a long time.