China’s Mona Lisa
There’s a beautiful painting by Zhang Zeduan called “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”. This scroll was painted in the early 12th century. Qingming Festival is arguably China’s most famous painting and is currently on exhibit at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.”Qingming Festival” is famous partly for its involvement over centuries in palace intrigues, theft and wars, and partly for its detailed, geometrically accurate images of bridges, wine shops, sedan chairs and boats beautifully juxtaposed with flowing Ines for the depiction of mountains and other natural scenery. Because of its fragility, the scroll is seldom displayed, even in Beijing, and has never been lent for overseas exhibition. Like the Mona Lisa, “Qingming Festival” is famous for being famous.Forgers could pass off their copies as the original partly because the original was repeatedly stolen or misappropriated from the imperial collection, starting as early as the 1340s. It kept showing up at the hands of wealthy people from whom the emperors repeatedly recovered it when they confiscated estates during disputes.The National Palace Museum in Taipei takes pride in holding 10 ancient copies of the original “Qingming Festival” in its collection. But art scholars agree that the Palace Museum in Beijing does indeed own the original.
The original article can be found in New York Times titled “‘China’s Mona Lisa’ Makes a Rare Appearance in Hong Kong”.
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Argh, I actually WENT today, all the way to the museum in TST to see it. And guess what? All the tickets for today and tomorrow were sold. Sold sold sold, it pissed me off so much.
I heard it’s incredibly long…