Page 28 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

also had ambitions for an official career, ambitions that were never realized. Offered a

position as court painter, he refused to countenance it. Chen addresses us from within the
world of the imagination, and does not try to challenge and seduce us with its wonders; on
the contrary, he exposes it to us like the physical evidence of a disease with which he is
afflicted. The landscape behind him is a barren lake strewn with rocky islands; the trees in
whose shadow he stands have welded together oppressively, and are watched mistrustfully

by his nephew. Chen himself is an uncomfortable fusion of frontal and three-quarter views;
his left eye, set lower than his right, creates a gaze of utter separation -- from his
surroundings, from us. He inhabits some painful limbo of futility, momentarily suspended

between the utter strangeness of his landscape, and the unattainable rationality of our gaze.
The inscription, which speaks ostentatiously of the pursuit of pleasure, serves only to
intensify our sense of his harsh self-awareness.