Asian Art - Chinese Art Scrolls

Chinese Art Scrolls

Description

For thousands of years, the hanging scroll has been a popular art form in China, allowing the artist to display images on walls in buildings and temples. Done on silk and paper, these scrolls include mounting systems involving wooden bars and cords to allow easy display and for storage when the scroll is not in use.

Handscrolls, the predominant traditional format, are intended to not be displayed but rather unrolled from right to left and viewed a section at a time. The Chinese speak of “reading a painting” to describe the flow of delights and surprises. But hanging scroll art is appropriate for the modern style of displaying paintings on the walls. By taking advantage of the hanging scroll technology, today both homes and temples often rotate hanging scroll art, but the images can also be separated from the scrolls for framing and permanent display if so desired.

Artists have used scrolls to depict a wide range of images as well as calligraphy. Popular scrolls include religious themes and parables, landscapes and garden scenes, animals and birds, and much more. Among the most famous pieces of Chinese art in scroll forms were One Hundred Horses, the Fuchun Mountains, A Night Banquet, Five Oxen, Nymph of the Luo River, and Qingming Festival. The Palace Museum in Beijing houses many of these original works of art, some many centuries old, and current artists frequently use these historical treasures as a foundation for their own scrolls. Modern printing technology has allowed these ancient, fragile, and priceless pieces of art to become available for home decoration.