Background: I first saw this scroll on a side street in downtown Hong Kong at a dealer’s shop in 1973. As explained in Malcolm Caldwell’s Blink, some experiences hit you, some image strikes you in the pit of your stomach and your mind, and you feel its message. You know this experience but cannot tell anyone else why it is so important to you. It is, in Caldwell’s words, “thin slicing” an experience which is so complex and difficult that you cut through all the details and see some essence, some underlying “truth” about what you experience. It was like that the first time that I slowly journeyed through this Ming scroll. It is not complete. It has no writing at the beginning or end to lead the way. In fact, some of the figures in the middle are cut in half because it was restored (the silk was cut slightly down and backed with new paper). At first, I studied it with a magnifying glass and a goblet of wine. The magnification was for isolating and examining details; the wine was to relax my being and remind me of how the literati Chinese scholars might study this work of art in the past with invited friends, sipping, telling stories and admiring.

Of course, I could not afford it. The price was higher than a college professor could save in a year. But on the other side of the decision was over ten years of study, starting with a New York State grant to study at NYU and Harvard on Chinese painting and culture in 1965, followed up by a Fulbright-Hays Study Grant to Taiwan and the Palace Museum in 1966. I had purposely taken a teaching/administrative position in 1968, when I was made Chairman of the Fine Arts Department (visual, dance, theater and music) at the University of Guam. I took the job to continue my studies in Chinese art and to allow my wife to visit the Orient, learning why I loved the art/culture so deeply (adding it to my passionate love of freedom in America). Guam was the bus station of the Pacific for me; everyone passed through there and it was a marvelous place to leave and come back to. Therefore, I made a deal with the art gallery dealer. If he would trust me to pay something each month until the scroll was bought, I would trust him to send it to me on Guam when that debt was paid. It took two years but both our trusts were honored.

Each year, for friends and students, about six to ten times a year, I take it out of its special box, discuss the circumstances of buying, studying and sharing it. I ask others to comment. It is only through others that the scroll grows in its base of knowledge. I tell my students all that I know about it and sit back. It was like the first time that I saw the Night Watch by Rembrandt, at the end of a large hall in Amsterdam, with students from our ship-campus, World Campus Afloat. I told them all the nuances that I could see or remember from my studies. I broke the work apart in terms of feelings, realism and composition. Then I became silent. The students’ asked, “Why don’t you tell us more?” My answer was, “I can’t. I have gone as far as words will take us-ME. I see more but I have no words to tell you about it. The painting must do that for you now.”

Today, I take the Ming landscape in the Sung style out again, and I say, “I will take you on a journey of peace and fellowship. It is mostly a Sung experience: relaxing on the lake with friends. But it is a Ming scroll and they do not follow all the Sung rules. Remember that on our journey.”

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