THE ART OF MU XIN: The Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes

Now in his mid-70s, Mu Xin is a reclusive Chinese émigré writer and painter, longtime resident in the Forest Hills section of Queens, N.Y., whose work is unfamiliar to most nonspecialists. Since very few of Mu Xin's voluminous writings in poetry and prose have appeared in English, his writing achievement must be taken on faith in English-speaking countries, but this gorgeous, large-format book leaves his painterly skills in no doubt. Accompanying a traveling exhibition of his paintings, it includes nearly three dozen landscape paintings from the late 1970s, just after the infamous Cultural Revolution, as well as calligraphic sheets written as a political prisoner in 1972, 56 b&w and 54 color illustrations in all. Munroe (Yes Yoko Ono), director of New York's well-appointed Japan Society Gallery, offers a factual preface on the artist, while four experts in the field weigh in with subtlety and intelligence, most notably Yale professor Richard Barnhart, whose chapter, "Landscape Painting at the End of Time," places the painter in the broad context of Chinese art and literature. The paintings, somber in tone and mightily concerned with texture, are very well reproduced here and should win over browsers. University of Chicago professor Wu Hung finds that Mu Xin, although "elusive" as a person and creator, is a greater artist than the recent Nobel Prize–winning writer Gao Xingjian (also a painter) "in terms of both the stylistic subtlety of his painting and the thematic richness of his writing." This is an excellent and unexpected addition to any collection on modern Asian art, and the book is so very wide (at 11 × 16) that it will easily fill a coffee table by itself. (Dec.)