The first comprehensive exhibition of Luo Ping’s paintings ever presented in America, Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) on view at Metropolitan Museum of Art, will bring together nearly 60 works, including many Chinese “National Treasures,” by one of the most celebrated painters in 18th-century China. Complemented by 27 pieces from American collections, this momentous international-loan exhibition will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist’s vision as well as his place among his peers. Highlights of the exhibition will include the sensational handscroll Ghost Amusements (ca. 1766)—one of the best known paintings in the late imperial China—depicting the world of ghosts that, he claimed, he had seen with his own eyes. The youngest of the so-called “Eight Eccentrics,” a group of highly individualistic artists active in the prosperous metropolis of Yanzhou, Luo Ping was an extraordinary artist, whose works influenced the course of later Chinese painting.
“Luo Ping was very much a man of his times,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, “And, being labeled an eccentric suggests that he exhibited the kind of individuality that we associate with western artists today. Luo faced issues of artistic integrity and patronage not so different from what contemporary artists must grapple with. This exhibition provides a rare opportunity to get to know a Chinese artist in all his complexity.”
via: The Beat
