Two Eagles, dated 1702. Zhu Da (Bada Shanren; 1626–1705). Hanging scroll; ink on paper; 73 x 35 1/2 in. (185.4 x 90 cm). Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family. Lent by Oscar L. Tang (1997.30).

The process whereby so many of Mr. Wang's treasures came to the Metropolitan began in 1973 with the acquisition of twenty-five Song and Yuan masterpieces from Mr. Wang as a first step toward expanding the Museum's holdings of Asian art. At the time, the Museum lacked a permanent space for the display of Chinese painting. Twenty-five years later, in 1998, the Metropolitan Museum completed its goal of an entire wing devoted to Asian art, a veritable museum within the Museum, incorporating the largest display space for Chinese painting and calligraphy outside Asia. This display space includes the renovated Douglas Dillon Galleries, first opened in 1981, as well as two new display spaces, the C. C. Wang Gallery and the Frances Young Tang Gallery, the latter named in honor of Oscar Tang's late wife, completed in 1997. With the recent promised gift of 12 paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection from Museum Trustee Oscar Tang and his family, the Metropolitan may now present the and calligraphy in the West.

Among the rarest of the masterpieces in the Tang promised gift is Riverbank, one of the largest and earliest monumental landscape paintings known, and widely accepted in China as a rare work of the 10th century. Mr. Wang has long regarded the painting as his most important possession. In 1973, when the Metropolitan Museum acquired a group of twenty-five Song and Yuan paintings from Mr. Wang, he declined to include Riverbank in the group. At the time, Mr. Wang's son, S. K. Wang, was still living in China and Mr. Wang believed that he might have to relinquish Riverbank to the Chinese government in order to secure his son's emigration. Only after S. K. Wang and his family had moved to the United States did he consider parting with the scroll.

Riverbank's impact on later painting styles is exemplified by a second masterpiece included in the Tang Family promised gift, Simple Retreat by Wang Meng (ca. 1308–1385). Living through a period of political disintegration at the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), scholar-artists such as Wang Meng drew inspiration from the visions of the landscape created by Dong Yuan and other 10th-century painters who lived during a similarly chaotic period following the collapse of the Tang dynasty (618–907). But in the late 14th century, the 10th-century ideal of landscape as a place for contemplative self-cultivation seemed unattainable. Although Wang Meng's revival of imagery first created during the chaotic Five Dynasties period served as a thinly veiled allusion to the political turmoil of his own time, the earlier embodiment of the eremitic ideal was undermined by Wang's non-realistic style and pictorial narrative was no longer taken at face value. While the scholar-recluse in Riverbank seems secure from the thunderstorm that swirls around him, the security of the master of Simple Retreat is contradicted by the tumultuous brushwork of his environment. The tempest that blows through Simple Retreat is no longer a rain storm, but the inner tumult of the artist manifested through his expressive brushwork.