It often feels like early autumn in the Chinese painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lights is warm but small the décor, wheat-beige and nut-brown. Irrespective of sparks of shade, the ink-and-brush paintings are visually subdued their illustrations or photos can be hard to browse from even a brief distance away. And though the galleries hold the museum’s lasting collection of Chinese paintings, no image stays for long. As opposed with Western-style oil painting — a hardy, meat-and-potatoes, survivalist medium — Classical Chinese portray is fragile. Normally carried out in ink on silk, it has two organic enemies: time and gentle. The danger is significantly less that…