The Quiet Presence of the Song Dynasty To look at the work of Lin Chun is to look back into the Song dynasty. The details of a life lived in that era remain largely obscured by the passage of centuries, leaving only the brushstrokes to speak. There is a stillness in the surviving records, a sense of a hand moving across silk or paper during a time of profound cultural shifts in China. We know the artist through the objects left behind, specifically those held within the halls of The Palace Museum in Beijing. The traces of this life are found in the way ink meets the surface. There is no grand…