The scroll Autumn Forests at Yushan (1668) by Wang Hui is too idyllic to be true. The mountains are impossibly large and vertical. They seem to be made of a collection of mossy boulders that have happily come together to form a steep peak dotted with red, hunter green, and lavender-tinted trees. The trees form a snaking path through misty clouds to a rocky summit. Quaint houses and a tiny person are tucked into the scene.

“Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717),” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring more than 20 masterworks by the renowned late Imperial Chinese landscape painter, is a display of various efforts not to record reality, but to create perfection.

“Landscape painting in later Chinese art was not ... dependent upon the observation of actual scenery,” curator Maxwell Hearn writes in the preface to the exhibition catalog. Wang Hui was considered a master because he was able to successfully copy—and later incorporate and improve on—the styles of earlier well-known landscape painters. The show at the Met emphasizes this by showing Wang Hui’s works just a few rooms away from those of his predecessors. However, the illustration of this stylistic lineage is not the most interesting part of the exhibition. It is most fascinating to see what Chinese landscape painting had designated as ideal—what these artists from hundreds of years ago and thousands of miles away saw as Nature with a capital “N.”

Every hanging scroll and hand scroll is beautifully and delicately inked and colored. The scene portrayed on each one cannot be described as anything but sublime and overpowering. The mountains are large and craggy. Clouds embrace every peak, and most of the trees are big and distinguished-looking—the types of trees that bend at odd angles after standing strong for a century or more. The people, houses, bridges, and fishing boats are always dwarfed by their natural surroundings.

The choices in scale and composition can be attributed to the artist’s need to address earlier painting styles, but the sublimity of the landscapes still seems significant. Wang Hui’s vision (as well as his predecessors’ visions) of nature takes a perspective similar to that of many famous Americans who have examined nature through art and other cultural outlets. In numerous personal essays, John Muir—one of the most prominent early figures in the National Parks movement—describes being overwhelmed by nature in the same way that Wang Hui’s fictional figures are engulfed by the peaks they stand at the base of or the lakes and waterfalls they sit next to.

Muir and his fellow wilderness-lovers (like Transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the artists of the Hudson River School) expressed in prose, verse, and oil paints the power and poetry of the American wilderness. They portrayed a vast and pristine landscape that was impressive in its scale, beauty, and ability to make the human insignificant. Wang Hui’s scrolls—the delicacy of the brushwork, the vertical composition, and the actual poems written in the corners of the works—create a very similar view of nature.

This potent impression of wilderness was likely not Wang Hui’s goal. But it is this quality of his work that may speak most to the Western viewer. Many of his scrolls reinforce the romantic visions of natural landscapes—of purple mountains’ majesty, spacious skies, and amber waves of grain—that linger in one’s imagination. While this fantastical view is appealing, learning about Wang Hui’s work reminds us that it is not always grounded in reality. When approaching issues that surround our natural environment, it may be more useful to deal with and think about real nature rather than the fantasy that is Nature.