A Chinese artist featured in the Ink Art exhibition in 2014 has his own face overwritten with Chinese characters, as a commentary on cultural labeling. [Photo provided to China Daily]

One place for self-cultivation is inside a carefully conceived Ming Dynasty scholar's garden.

"The Ming court had a powerful navy that sailed to the east coast of Africa, but you don't see a painting from that period in which a powerful general was planting a flag on a beach. They prefer to be seen in their own garden. Above all, they want to be remembered not as bureaucrats or governors of the state, but as gentlemen who understood the leisure practice of painting, calligraphy, music and chess."

Hearn sees the construction of the Ming section of the Great Wall as the era's most potent metaphor for a garden retreat.

"They probably saw no need to go beyond this vast, perfect garden," says Hearn, referring to a shut-door policy partly blamed for the country's decline in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Back to his own garden at the Met, Hearn said one thing he cannot help noticing is that while Chinese visitors tend to walk along the pathway skirting around the center of the garden, most of the Westerners step right into the middle.

"For ancient Chinese, the most valuable thing is the empty space," he says, evoking the concept of liubai, a crucial aesthetic principle that translates into "retaining the blankness (for it is imbued with meaning)".