Page 67 - 2019 September 10th Sotheby's Important Chinese Art Jades, Met Museum Irving Collection NYC

The present sculpture, carved from a tall jade boulder, capitalizes on the material’s inherent
qualities to create a towering stone grotto framing Abheda, who is seated in solitude with a
sutra in hand and a censer burning nearby. The cavernous setting has been expertly crafted
to give the impression of raw naturalism, while simultaneously providing the artisan with
the requisite surfaces to render the arhat almost completely in the round and inscribe two
accompanying texts above the Þ gure and a third on the reverse of the boulder. As a result,
the artist was able to faithfully translate Guanxiu’s (832-912) iconic painting of Abheda into
three-dimensional form, to incorporate the Qianlong Emperor’s annotations on the painting,
and to invigorate the nearly millennium-old image by sculpting it in luminous jade that captures
light and shadow. By giving physical substance to the luohan, the sculpture invites viewers to
walk around the artwork as they consider its religious signiÞ cance. In each of these ways, the
pictorial boulder follows the Qianlong Emperor’s standards for adaptations of classical paintings
carved in stone.
This particular image of Abheda can be traced to the portrait series of the sixteen luohan
painted by the Tang dynasty painter-poet-monk, Guanxiu, in 891. In it, the artist depicted the
enlightened disciples with grotesque bodies, hunched backs, bushy eyebrows, and pronounced
foreheads, as they had allegedly appeared to him in a dream. He then labeled each portrait with
the Sinicized name of the arhat, according to the pilgrim Xuanzang’s (596-664) translation
of the Fahua jin (Annotated Record of Buddhism). These bizarre portraits captured the
imaginations of devotees, and the series was preserved in the Shengyin Temple near Qiantang
(now Hangzhou) until 1861.
In 1757, the Qianlong emperor visited the Shengyin Temple during his Southern inspection tour
to study the portraits as an act of religious devotion. There is some debate as to whether the
emperor viewed the original paintings or later copies, but in any case, he recorded that he had
seen the masterpieces by Guanxiu and was inspired to personally study their contents and have
their images proliferated. As a serious practitioner of Buddhism, the emperor noticed that the
names on each of the portraits did not conform to the Sanskrit, so he annotated the paintings
with the corrected names and reordered them according to his own teacher’s interpretation
of their sequence in the Tongwen yuntong (UniÞ ed Rhymes). The emperor then penned two
colophons on each painting, respectively eulogizing and reidentifying the luohan depicted. On
the painting of the sixteenth luohan, Abheda, he also added a lengthy colophon describing his
process of studying and reattributing each image.

CHINESE ART FROM THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: THE FLORENCE AND HERBERT IRVING GIFT 65