Kristin Writes the World

Inside the National Palace Museum outside of Taipei, our guide Rosalyn stops at the foot of the stairs and reminds us to cultivate a sense of patience because the lines can be long.

We obey. After all, since the museum’s inception in the 1960s, what we’re about to see has consistently been voted the most popular piece of art in the entire museum: the piece lovingly called the Mona Lisa of the East. As the line surges forward, groups of curious tourists shuffling in and out as if on a highly-functioning conveyor belt, I begin to wonder: What could Taiwan’s most prized art possession be? A painting by an emperor’s hand? A stone head of a famous person? An ancient artifact from the first empire? A fantastic piece of stunning jewelry?

Actually, it is none of these things.

Our turn for the room came, and I see it, the little 7-inch long masterpiece propped up on a wooden easel in a glass box in the center of the room, track lighting illuminating it from both above and below. The Mona Lisa’s eastern counterpart is slightly more unusual than a cross-dressed self-portrait: it is a teeny tiny carving of a piece of cabbage with a bug on it.

After a few minutes of respectful silence, allowing for all sets of curious eyes to travel around the glass box, Rosalyn pipes up. A jade masterwork is typically flawless, she says, cut from a perfect stone without any visible variations of color. This piece, though, carved sometime in the 1800s, relishes in that imperfection, the shape emerging from the color variants of white and green, the cracks and striations the inspiration for the vegetable. We cherish it because it is perfection cut from imperfection. This, she says, is the Taiwanese way.

As I stand there, looking at this delicately carved precious piece of semi-fine stone with the softly ruffled leaves, the smooth lines trailing down the veined stalk, the cracks and imperfections used to emphasize the growth patterns in the leaves, the grasshopper carved right out of a leaf, I can’t help but realize just how much my perception of art skews Western, dictated by a history of looking at oil paintings, sculptures of naked men, head busts, and Da Vincis.

This is something new entirely.

As I turn to leave, feeling a new appreciation for produce, I notice what’s in the next glass box, poised delicately on a pedestal: it is a preserved pork chop on a platter.