Hidden Valley, after Guo Xi

This large and impressive landscape painting was created in the early 1960s, which was a transitional period in the stylistic development of the 20th century master Chang Dai-chien. It was during this period that Chang emerged from more strictly traditional styles of painting to create a new style of landscape depiction, which he called  "splashed ink and color". This innovative approach exerted a profound influence both on Chang's contemporaries and on the subsequent generation of landscape painters in China, and is the style for which Chang Dai-chien is best known. The proposed gift from the Sackler Foundation fully represents this important creative turning point in the artist's career.

Despite the innovative and strongly individualistic qualities of his later work, Chang Dai-chien himself always claimed to derive his inspiration from the great traditions of the past. In his lengthy inscription on this painting, for example, Chang states that he has merely allowed his creative mood to reinterpret a famous painting by the Northern Song dynasty master Guo Xi (ca. 1001-ca. 1090) called Hidden Valley, which is now in the collection of the Shanghai Museum. While many of the basic compositional elements and details of brushwork do in fact derive from that ancient master, it is Chang's fresh and novel approach that most fundamentally defines the character of this work.