When Shawn Eichman was putting together "Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City," the history-making exhibit on display at the Hono­lulu Academy of Arts, he had a lot of paintings to choose from.

"They have approximately 190,000 works of Chinese painting and calligraphy," said Eichman, curator of Asian art, in describing the holdings of the Palace Museum in Beijing, known also as the Forbidden City.

The exhibit comprises 56 paintings never before exhibited outside China and rarely exhibited inside the country.

"I was thinking about the artists in our collection, and ultimately what we agreed on was that for almost every artist in the show, we’ll have more than one painting from the Palace Museum by that artist and then we’ll have paintings from our own collection," he said. "We’ll be bringing paintings by the same artist that have been separated sometimes for centuries back together again. … It’s a very special moment for us."

That sentiment resonates throughout the exhibit, which invokes not only Chinese history but a sense of place, in addition to displaying classical Chinese paintings. The exhibit includes works by the "Four Masters" of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368): Ni Zan, Zhao Mengfu, Wu Zhen and Wang Meng.

"These are artists that, in the history of East Asian painting, are of the same stature and level of influence of Leonardo Da Vinci, or Michelangelo, or Caravaggio," Eichman said. "For East Asia, they have a towering stature as the most important artists in all of history."

The exhibit was designed to enable viewers to understand why these painters are exalted. Each painting is displayed in a separate case rather than in groupings, so that each can be appreciated as an individual work.

"We want people to find a painting they like, spend all their time with that painting, and then come back another time (and) find another painting," Eichman said.

Looking at Zhao Mengfu’s "Rock and Bamboo," for example, one can observe the variety of brush techniques the painter used, such as the "flying white" stroke, in which the hairs of the brush are separated, allowing the silk or paper canvas to show.

The Four Masters painted during a crisis of confidence in China that stemmed from the Mongol invasion, Eichman said. The imperial art academy, which had previously created paintings for the Chinese court and was the sole repository for art, was dissolved. Instead, painting began as a practice for scholars concerned with defining a new cultural identity.

"Painting becomes one of the avenues of exploring what it means to be Chinese," Eichman said.

Technique, subject matter and most of all, attitude of the artists, changed, he said.

"It became more about personal expression. … You did a painting for yourself as a way of exploring your own thoughts and ideas."

Painters such as Ni Zan, the most famous of the Four Masters, would reduce his topic "to its most fundamental elements," Eichman said.

In his "Secluded Stream and Cold Pine," "you just get the mountains and the trees, the water is just depicted just by leaving areas of blank paper, and so it takes the whole language that they were developing to its extreme of subtlety."

To show the lasting influence of the Four Masters, the exhibit includes landscapes from succeeding dynasties, up to the final one, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912).

With a circular entryway, wall-size photographs of a garden and a re-creation of a scholar’s studio, the academy’s exhibit creates the ambience of Chinese literati culture at its most idyllic.

"The idea is, you’re being invited into a garden … to see a collection of paintings," Eichman said.

China strictly regulates its cultural artifacts, only recently allowing paintings by the Four Masters out of China. The academy is only the second U.S. institution (the other was New York’s Metropolitan Museum) to display paintings from the Forbidden City.

A confluence of events, including the launch of direct flights between China and Hawaii, and Hawaii’s longstanding historical ties to China encouraged officials there to support the exhibit, Eichman said.

After the show, the paintings will "go back into the vaults" and are unlikely to emerge for decades, he said.

"People throw around the term ‘once in a lifetime’ too often," he said, "But this really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these paintings."