Description: In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), Shen Chou (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries), and Shih-t'ao (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art. These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, conscious play between the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist. The artist is continually imitating the world -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor, in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement.

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