Demonstrates how Chinese literary traditions have echoed throughout Japan and Korea for more than 1,000 years. Collection includes landscape paintings, figure paintings, ceramics, lacquer ware and calligraphic scrolls. Chinese classical poems are an international culture code in East Asia. Many diverse factors account for the phenomenon of cross-cultural merging in this region. Using works from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, this catalogue concentrates on the classical Chinese poetry that Japanese and Korean elites learned and then applied to their own arts. The aristocracy first introduced the aesthetics of painted poetry and focused on specific images illustrated through a diverse range of media from painting to ceramics.