From Neolithic jade to the Great Wave: 82 works across China, Korea, Japan, and India, in 24 chapters.
Enter the galleryBuddhist images travelled from Gandhara to Nara; Chinese celadon taught Korean potters, who in turn taught Japan; Hokusai's prints sailed to Paris. These are four distinct traditions, constantly in dialogue.
China
Japan
Each bar spans the works in that chapter. Earlier centuries are compressed. Select a bar to jump to its chapter.
Huizong was a disastrous emperor and a brilliant artist. Under him the painting academy prized close observation; in 1127 the Jurchen captured him, and the Northern Song fell.
Made by joining two hemispheres, the moon jar is never perfectly round. Its plain white surface embodies Joseon Confucian ideals of modesty and naturalness.
Shiva dances within a ring of fire, destroying the universe so it can be renewed. Chola bronzes were cast by lost wax and carried in temple processions.
Sharaku produced around 140 kabuki actor prints in ten months and then vanished. His exaggerated, almost caricatured faces were too frank for many buyers.
Choose a civilization. Each chapter introduces a period or movement, what to look for, and the works that define it.
01
c. 3300–221 BCE
Before painting, there was ritual. Neolithic cultures carved jade, the hardest stone they knew, into discs and tubes for the dead; the Shang and Zhou cast bronze vessels to feed their ancestors. These were the most valuable objects in early China, and the beginning of its visual language.
02
206 BCE–907 CE
The Han and Tang buried their dead with mingqi, spirit goods: horses, camels, dancers, guardians, houses. Made to be seen by no one, they now tell us more about daily life, trade, and fashion along the Silk Road than any written record.
03
386–618
Buddhism reached China along the Silk Road, and with it the image of the Buddha. Over two centuries Chinese sculptors transformed foreign models into their own, from the slender, flame-haloed figures of the Northern Wei to the fuller, calmer forms of the Northern Qi cave temples.
04
960–1279
The Chinese word for landscape is shanshui, mountains and water. Under the Song it became the highest subject in painting: monumental northern peaks that dwarf the traveller, then southern corners of mist where empty silk does half the work.
05
Song dynasty masters
In China, writing was the supreme art, ranked above painting. A line of calligraphy cannot be corrected, so it was read as a direct trace of the writer's character and state of mind. Song masters broke with formal models to make the brush expressive.
06
1271–1644
When the Mongols conquered China, many scholars refused to serve and painted instead, for themselves and their friends. Literati painting valued personal expression over technical polish: dry brush, sparse compositions, and poems written directly on the picture.
07
1644–1912
The Manchu conquest split Chinese art in two. Loyal survivors of the Ming, like Bada Shanren and Shitao, painted strange and personal works; at court, the orthodox masters produced vast imperial commissions recording the emperor's power.
08
10th–15th centuries
China invented porcelain, and for a thousand years its kilns led the world. Song potters chased the colours of jade and ivory in quiet monochrome glazes; the Ming filled Jingdezhen porcelain with cobalt blue and shipped it across the globe.
Look closer · 清明上河圖
Along the River During the Qingming Festival, attributed to Zhang Zeduan. Handscrolls are read from right to left, an arm's length at a time. Keep scrolling to unroll it.
1 of 6
Morning in the countryside
The scroll opens at the right, in quiet fields and bare willows. Pack donkeys and travellers set off toward the capital.
Materials and methods
The look of Asian art comes from its materials: ink ground on stone, silk rolled into scrolls, porcelain fired hotter than any European kiln of its time.
文房四寶
Brush, ink stick, ink stone, and paper: the scholar's four treasures. Ink is ground fresh with water on the stone, and one stick yields every tone from pale grey mist to glossy black.
Pictured: Woods and Valleys of Mount Yu
手卷
A handscroll is unrolled an arm's length at a time, from right to left, so the viewer travels through time and space. It was never meant to be seen all at once.
Pictured: Along the River During the Qingming Festival
瓷器
Porcelain needs kaolin clay and kilns above 1,280 °C. Celadon's green comes from a small amount of iron fired in a kiln starved of oxygen.
Pictured: Maebyeong (plum bottle) decorated with cranes and clouds
木版
A publisher, a designer, a carver, and a printer: ukiyo-e was a team sport. Each colour needed its own carved block, aligned by hand with registration notches called kento.
Pictured: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
金屏風
Squares of hammered gold leaf were laid across folding screens, which stood in dim halls and caught lamplight. Momoyama warlords used them to dazzle visitors.
Pictured: Birds and Flowers
鑄造
China cast ritual bronzes in assembled clay piece-molds. India, Korea, and Japan cast Buddhist and Hindu images by the lost-wax method: a wax model, coated in clay, melted out and replaced by metal.
Pictured: Nataraja, Shiva as the Lord of Dance
Filter by tradition and medium, search for an artist or a material, and select any work to look closer.
82 works
Images and object data come from the open-access collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0), and from public domain files on Wikimedia Commons. Each work links to its source. Notes are by The Eastern Canon.
