Wu Bin's Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is pleased to present Wu Bin’s Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone, featuring one of the most extraordinary paintings of a stone ever created. In ancient China, strange and marvelous stones were valued for their beauty and as reflections of the hidden structures underlying the universe. Stones were seen as fluid and dynamic, constantly changing, and capable of magical transformations. Wu Bin’s Ming dynasty handscroll, painted in 1610, comprises 10 separate views of a single stone from the famous site of Lingbi, Anhui Province. Each view is rendered with exceedingly complex brushwork as fine lines twist, waver, and unravel, describing the shifting shapes of the stone’s peaks, vales, crevices, and caverns. These lines combine with subtle washes of ink to convey the sense that one is looking not at stone, but at pure energy.