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Swathes of withered lotuses stand silently in a pond, their leaves and flowers long wilted away. Having weathered storms, wind and frost year after year, they seem weak and detached, caring naught about the prosperity of those colorful flowers in bloom around them.
This natural vicissitude is a picture of beauty, the same sort visualized in The Peak of Poetic Perfection, an ink wash painting by Yan Zhen, one of the most promising poets in the early years of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Yan Zhen was born Yan Guiqing in 1930 in Laiyang, east China's Shandong Province, and his childhood memories there would later come to have a profound influence on his art. Now 84 years old, the painter and poet often thinks of the nights he spent with his father on a kang, a traditional brick platform used for sleeping in north China, chanting poetry from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) while snowflakes flew in the chilly wind outside.
Yan has long held a penchant for writing his own poems, ever since taking part in the Communist Party of China-led revolution, which culminated in the founding of the PRC in 1949, when Yan was 15. However, it was not until his 1985 visit to the United States as a member of a...