Shanghai artists display ancient skills in Athens
TWO artists from Shanghai Museum initiated visitors to the Acropolis Museum in Athens into the traditional Chinese arts of calligraphy and painting.
Calligrapher and exhibition designer and associate curator Yuan Qiming and painter and assistant curator of painting and calligraphy Yan Xiaojun worked before visitors, as if they were in their own studios.
Athens Acropolis Museum hosted a four-day workshop that ended on Sunday in the context of a memorandum of cooperation signed between the two museums and the 2017 Greece-China Year of Cultural Exchanges and Cooperation in Creative Industries.
“Visitors are very interested in the Chinese techniques of calligraphy and painting,” said Dimitris Pantermalis, president of Acropolis Museum.
Two treasures from Shanghai Museum are on display at the Acropolis Museum for an exhibition that will last until April 30. The two masterpieces are the bronze pan of Zi Zhong Jiang dating to the 7th century BC, and the hand scroll painting “Traveling along the Clear River” created by artist Wu Hong in the 17th century.
“We have brought two pieces of exhibits that is a bronze pan and a hand scroll of Chinese painting that represent the ancient Chinese art. We are going to paint a landscape, and I will show you the calligraphy of Chinese in ancient times,” Yuan said. He presented major script types of Chinese calligraphy, one of the trademarks of Chinese culture.
“I am surprised when I am writing, some of the visitors know so much about Chinese culture and they can tell what I am writing. It is amazing.”
For his part, Yan improvised in his painting with free hand skill and ink-wash just as the literati painters did, with various subjects such as colored landscape and flowers.
“I have performed similar paintings just like we have here exhibited on display in the museum. I depicted yesterday a landscape of China and I will paint another landscape in north China,” Yan said.
“They have similarities, but you can see the differences between the landscapes from the north and south. I used special techniques to depict different kind of rocks in the landscape.”
Chinese painting is an art, which has a deep-rooted tradition and a unique style, employing a “dots and lines” structure and the writing brush, ink stick, silk and paper as the main tools.
In the spirit of exchange, two exquisite objects from the Acropolis Museum are being exhibited at Shanghai Museum until April 8.
The two antiquities loaned are a marble statue of a Kore (520-510BC), one of the most beautiful and well-preserved sculptures of the Acropolis, which retains traces of its archaic colors, and a red-figure basin lid with a Dionysian scene (350-325BC).
“We have sent to Shanghai two masterpieces from the Acropolis Museum, and we sent also two conservators to present there the way the ancient Greeks worked with marble, how they made sculptures,” Pantermalis said.