left 66” x 42”; right 66”x 21”, oil on canvas.

The previous declining year still winding its brocade

Around the always newly out of style pavilions.

Stone cisterns coiled about with dragons.

Lakeside temples attended by cypresses,

Their shadows bowing in imitation.

Monuments that litter the city,

The scattered leaves of public greatness.

But the time for awe is past.

The veneration of a way of being

Held up like a mirror

In a kind of hopeful vanity

Toward a time that never was.

Hangzhou is likely the city that Marco Polo visited in Song Dynasty. It is famed for its beautiful West Lake, with its temples and sites for viewing celebrated by poets, calligraphers and painters for many centuries. The city was and still is famous for its production of silk: the colours of my painting are based on a silk scarf I saw there. I visited Hangzhou to see the Buddhist Temples there, where Ch’an (Zen) may have begun and where Su Shi practiced. The painting treats West Lake’s haze of beauty and my friend Yam Lau’s comment that both of us were interested in an ideal China, a vision promoted by the poets, calligraphers and painters of the Tang and Song dynasties.