Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

'Travellers among Mountains and Streams', painted around AD 1000 by the Northern Song master Fan Kuan, is the defining monument of Chinese monumental landscape. On a silk hanging scroll nearly two metres high, a vast mountain confronts the viewer head-on, its sheer cliff-face and cascading waterfall rendered in dense, axe-cut texturing strokes (fupi cun); below, a tiny caravan of travellers and a mule picks its way along the foot, dwarfed by the natural world. One of the most revered of all Chinese paintings, it is shown only rarely to preserve the fragile silk.

Exhibition Venue

National Palace Museum

Taipei, Taiwan