Cold Forests on Snowy He Mountain: 寒林雪渮山 (Hanlin xue Ge Shan)

In this large scroll, Huang Junbi reflects on the austerity of winter and the new life that comes with spring. While the painting’s format—a landscape accompanied by an artist’s inscription—seems straightforward, there is actually a subtle interplay of image and word. Huang depicts a cold, hazy world of wild nature under a mantle of snow, where desolate silence is broken only by the passage of a solitary boat, seen in the painting but cited also in the accompanying poem: A few trees, cold forests in snow along the Ge River, Mountain ranges of the Jade Mountain line up in the cold, A single boat drifts on the watery expanse and is hesitantly homebound as it waves aside the evening smoke. Yet, at the end of his inscription, the artist wrote: Painted in the "White Cloud Pavilion" on a spring day in 1963. In so doing, Huang makes a subtle shift in the time of year. In this way, the slow, yet inexorable motion of the boat described in the text acts as a metaphor for inevitable seasonal change, between wintry death and springtime renewal.