ART: TREASURES OF THE EMPIRE

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For human happiness, democracy may be all very well; but for the visual arts, nothing beats 4,000 years of rigorous bureaucratic feudalism presided over by a lofty elite of scholars with a divine Emperor on top. Such is the lesson of the Metropolitan Museum's present exhibition, "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei." Normally when those spavined cliches "treasure," "splendor" or "masterpiece" occur in the name of an exhibition, doubt rises: Methinks the museum doth protest too much. Not this time. In terms of sheer quality, this show can claim to be the greatest conspectus of Chinese art ever held in America.

Its task, on the face of it, is impossible: to epitomize this vast field of visual culture, across four millenniums, with a mere 475 objects--ink paintings and calligraphy, porcelain and jade, lacquer and bronze. And yet it works, for three reasons. The first is the often sublime beauty of the objects. The second is the coherence of its frame: everything comes from the Chinese imperial collections as they developed over the centuries; thus what we see is the slowly changing profile of the highest court taste. And the third is that the museum's 650-page tome of a catalog, prepared under the supervision of Wen C. Fong, the Met's curator of Chinese art, is probably the best introduction to its subject in print.

So why does its cover reproduce a painting that isn't in the show? And why have 22 other choice items gone missing, while the main original sponsors, Mobil and Citibank, pulled out under mainland Chinese pressure as the long process of negotiation and selection was nearing its end? Politics, alas. The loan of these works of art has become a large hot potato in Taipei. And negotiating it proved a diplomatic nightmare for the Met, a four-year walk on eggshells.

On one side there are the Taiwanese officials and others who view the loan to America as a politically essential gesture of cultural goodwill, especially now that mainland China is rattling its missiles and threatening once more to retake what Beijing regards as a runaway province. (Probably the Taipei museum would never have lent the material if the Taiwan government hadn't wanted to stick a finger up Beijing's nostril.) However, Taiwanese cultural nationalists have denounced the loan as a cynical game with irreplaceable national symbols whose meaning cannot in any case be appreciated by the round-eyed barbarians who will flock to the Met to see them. Many Taiwanese regard any American opening to Beijing as betrayal; at the same time, they tend to see themselves, through Taiwan's ownership of the imperial collections, as the true preservers of traditional Chinese art, even though not much art of significance was actually made on that island when it was a province of the empire.