Recently, a very charming Chinese gentleman, a visiting scholar at Cornell University whose field is Chinese Literature, stopped by our little gallery at the Ithaca Farmers Market. He was quite taken by Jim's (Lishan's) work, and graciously sent me a translation of the poem that Jim had inscribed on an ink and watercolor painting of a tea plant.
The poem was written some 1250 years ago, during the Northern Song Dynasty, by a revered Chinese scholar, Su Shi, during a period, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considered "the most brilliant era in later imperial Chinese History."
Su Shi, it is said, often visited the ancient town of Shaobo, which sits on the northern bank of the Yangtze River in East China. On one of these visits, feeling lonely and wanting someone to talk with, Su Shi went to an ancient temple, the Fanxing Temple, on the shore of Shaobo Lake in the west of town.
There, instead of finding human companionship, Su Shi found himself in a drizzling rain "alone in the world" with the temple's only occupant, a tea plant. Face to face with the tea plant, he talked and talked, but the tea plant answered with silence and burst into bloom "like a flame in the snow."
At Dancing Brush Designs, we feature a number of prints of paintings by a master of the Chinese brush, Jim Hardesty (He Lishan). These prints are museum-quality fine-art giclée (zhee-clay) reproductions of ink-and-watercolor works on fine archival paper. Giclée prints "stand apart with their extremely high level of quality, longevity, and value."
We would be pleased if you would visit our site and take pleasure in some truly beautiful works of Chinese art.