Author name: Aliénor Aisin-Gioro

A single running-script line breaks loose from its own grammar and keeps going, as if the brush decided the sentence was less interesting than the speed. The scroll is attributed to Wang Xianzhi, son of the sage Wang Xizhi, and it shows the family gift at full gallop: characters leaning into each other, a few

Nine lines of awkward, aching characters are all that survive of a letter written almost seventeen hundred years ago, and they are the oldest calligraphy in China attributed to a named hand. Lu Ji was a poet and prince who wrote the letter to a sick friend, promising to visit and asking after medicine. The

Two men sit on a mountainside and refuse to eat. They are the lords of Boyi and Shuqi, who starved rather than serve a new dynasty, and Li Tang paints the hunger as a kind of dignity. Li Tang was the bridge between Northern and Southern Song painting. When the court fled south after 1127,

Spring has not quite arrived, and Guo Xi paints the moment it decides to. Melting streams cut the valley floor while the peaks above still hold the cold, and a mist gathers where the season is still arguing with itself. Guo Xi served the Song court as both painter and theorist. His treatise, the ‘Lofty

A mountain fills the frame and does not apologise for it. Below its cliff a thread of travellers and a loaded mule pick their way through shadow, small enough that the rock above seems to breathe. Fan Kuan painted this scroll in the eleventh century and then, it seems, disappeared into his own subject. He