The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Imperial Carts (Gosho guruma)

Art Object

Peony Pavilion

Presented November 30, 2012

Tan Dun, director

With the aim of animating Metropolitan Museum galleries in new ways, Met Museum Presents offers one of five performances of the sixteenth-century Kunqu opera masterpiece The Peony Pavilion, in a seventy-minute version developed and directed by celebrated composer Tan Dun with choreography by Huang Doudou, one of China's most prominent dancers, in the Met's Astor Court, the courtyard modeled on a seventeenth-century garden.

The performance is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Chinese Gardens: Palace Pavilions, Scholars' Studios, Rustic Retreats, on view August 18, 2012–January 6, 2013, which explores the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than one thousand years, featuring more than seventy paintings and contemporary photographs as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, and textiles drawn from the Museum's collections.

The Peony Pavilion is one of the most important works of classical Chinese opera. A sweeping love story with subplots involving feudalism, the work in its original form consisted of fifty-five acts that take more than twenty hours to perform. This version is directed by Zhang Jun, one of China's most respected Kunqu performers, and remains faithful to the core plot focusing on the love story between the heroine and hero—Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei—and the Peony Pavilion where their love began.

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Imperial Carts (Gosho guruma)

Period:: Edo period (1615–1868)
Date:: mid-17th century
Culture:: Japan
Medium:: Six-panel folding screen; ink, color, and gold on gilt paper
Dimensions:: 65 3/4 x 148 1/2in. (167 x 377.2cm)
Classification:: Screens
Credit Line:: Gift of Mrs. P. H. B. Frelinghuysen, 1962
Accession Number:: 62.98.5

This artwork is not on display

Description

Lowered blinds tantalizingly suggest the presence of a beautiful lady or an elegant lord. This painting alludes to several classic literary scenes, among them an account in the "Heartvine" (Aoi) chapter of the Tale of Genji in which the attendants of Genji's mistresses create a crush of carts as they compete for the most advantageous position from which to view the Kamo festival. Combined with the motif of the heartvine, the ladies' beautifully appointed vehicles were a popular subject for lacquerware decoration. Here, devoid of human presence or of any evidence of the scuffle, the subject is treated as a purely decorative representation of the carts, quietly set among the delicate pinks of early summer.
See also
What
Metal (59,364)

Ink (28,327)

Paper (23,968)

Gold (12,457)

Gilt (9,043)

Furniture (5,725)

Panels (2,843)

Screens (318)

Folding screens (37)
Where
Asia (68,071)

Japan (21,819)
When
A.D. 1600-1800 (66,179)
In the Museum
Asian Art (35,222)
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Japan, 1600–1800 A.D.