Right? It's much more about the process than the piece. Would have also read that article, but I thought I was reading another.

I also thought there was going to be some actual mystery about this painting I've seen before, but don't know much about. I guess CNN got my click, I feel duped.

The headline writer used the old "mysterious Orient" trope, a casually racist idea that goes back to Westerners using words like "inscrutable" to describe Asians. It's lazy clickbait writing and really unfair to the quality of the actual article.

Art is it's own language, it doesn't translate well into English.

You can talk about an artist, his tools and techniques, you can talk about the historical context in which a work is first received, and you can track how the work has influenced future generations of artists, these are all things that the article touches upon. But to try and explain why a particular work is great is a fools errand. It's there in the work. Just look at it. It explains itself.