Poetic imagery

An exhibition, titled Mountains in the Hometown, is now showing more than 200 landscape paintings from Fang's oeuvre. Being held at the National Art Museum of China through Wednesday, the show has an immersive feel to it.

Wu Weishan, director of the museum, who, like Fang, is a native of Jiangsu province, says that, in the paintings, people are able to build a connection with nature in the way of woyou ("traveling while lying down"), a term first used by ancient intellectuals to describe the experience brought by displaying landscape paintings in people's homes.

Also, through this intimacy with the scenery, partly realistic and partly imagined, one's mind is driven to the depths of history to conduct a dialogue with the master landscape painters who lived centuries ago, such as Dong Yuan, Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang, whose philosophical takes on the relationship between people and the universe are reinterpreted in Fang's delicate paintings and calligraphy strokes.

"And in his world of art, Fang was not confined to depicting the landscapes of Jiangsu or Jiangnan, his real hometown," Wu says. "His paintings take people even further, not only physically, but also to a land they desire in their dreams."