Metropolitan Museum Observation Essay

I caught the faint laughter of the museum inhabitants and the shuffle of their feet, but other than that, I walked around the Metropolitan Museum in silence. The statues looked ethereal and stoic, the clay figures reminded me of a paused TV, but I was searching for something that I could hear. I strolled up to Gao Keming’s handscroll “Stream and Mountains under Fresh Snow” and the painting was more than what you could catch at a first glance. I caught the sound of a rushing steam, the stuffed crunch of snow being mated by footsteps, and silence of a different kind. It was the silence of nature that I usually head back home, and the echoing of my eardrum searching for noise, only hearing the muffled incoherent clamor from someplace far. I
When I first saw it, the various concentrations of black ink on the tan silk medium set the tone for the winter feel. Somber and muted initially, but at second glance I saw the interact details of certain moving figures and pieces of nature in the painting. I heard the noises like I was in a car driving past; my eyes swept over the far right hand side and the river was rushing around the creek stones under a wooden bridge. Not too far off, a family was having a meal and I envisioned the clicking of glasses and mumbled incomprehensible chatter. Progressing, I saw a boat and person alone by himself, maybe he could hear the water lapping and licking up against the boat side when his boat races and fell. On the shore opposite of this man and his vessel stood an empty house, and like mine, maybe one could occasionally hear the boards creak as its setting. On the left side of the piece, a man is seen trudging through the snow to this house. I imagine the snow sounds like packing cotton when he landed on it with his load on his back. While he’s making his way up the hill, the tree leaves shift around him. I can formulate this scene like a movie because of the way the line and shadows on the silk fit with a similar fashion of winter. The patterns and repetition we see throughout the piece creates more of a lifelike scene. For example, the repetitive curvilinear lines in the weather show that
Ou-Yang Hsiu’s poem describes a frozen river bank like the one pictured in the handscroll painting. At the end of the poem, it reveals a cormorant bird roosting on the “boats of the fisherman”. The scene is seemingly illustrated on the handscroll with the man in the baby blue robe on the boat. Just like the birds in the poem settle on the fishermen's boats, he also rests looking out into nature and enjoys being by himself without the ruckus of other people. Like the book “Songs of Love, Moon, and Wind”, “Streams and Mountains under Fresh Snow” is encompassed by natures constant changes, and away from human hectic