The most impressive part of the performance was the way director Zhang Yimou used the Chinese painting scroll as a platform and screening for recapping history.
This was every Chinese landscape painting scroll rolled, as it were, into one.
What's special about it is the creative process happens at the same time as the viewer beholds the painting often in a social gathering or in the privacy of a literati's study, the exchange of ideas and emotions between multiple artists/intellectuals are recorded on the painting scroll, which is rolled out gradually.
L D Institute of Indology houses about 76,000 hand-written Jain manuscripts with 500 illustrated versions and 45,000 printed books, making it the largest collection of Jain scripts, Indian sculptures, terracottas, miniature paintings, cloth paintings, painted scrolls, bronzes, woodwork, Indian coins, textiles and decorative art, paintings of Rabindranath Tagore and art of Nepal and Tibet.
The Fine Arts Library holds facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts and East Asian painting scrolls, which are available for research and teaching.
"But with Chinese painting — scrolls, for example — if produced for the emperor, it would have his seal right on the painting," augmenting its value.
On trips back home I discovered that almost everyone seemed to know someone who was involved, from all those extras -- an elf here, an orc there -- to carpenters fashioning seats for hobbits and calligraphers painting scrolls for wizards.
PRJ". Chinese painted scroll presented to Jacob Gould Schurman celebrating his eightieth birthday, by Chevalier S. K. Chen, Shangai.
Facing them is a 14th- to 15th-century painted scroll of a cosmic mandala, its packed, Collier brothers heaven framed by narrative panels as complex as those in any Renaissance altarpiece.
Hollywood Road has long been Hong Kong's historic center for traditional Chinese crafts, like carved jade, painted scrolls, antique chinaware or blackwood furniture.
Ceramics, painted scrolls, paper screens and lacquerware will be among 47 works from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco on display from Wednesday through July 9.
