This week the next in the series of Conversation and Cloth talks took place in the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth.
This time the theme was Art and Artists and clothes, costumes, fabrics and decorative items were all part of the show-and-tell. There were books to go along with the talk too.
The series focuses on pieces from the textile collection and one of those is a table runner of silk, a copy of a 10.5m long scroll, nearly nine hundred years old, depicting a festival along a river. The scroll is now held in Beijing at the Palace Museum.
This scroll shows scenes along a river and its title 清明上河圖 can be translated to mean “The Spring Festival along the river” or “Peace reigns over the river”. It was created by Zhang Zeduan 張擇端 although there are no contemporary records of this artist and any information about him comes from after his death.
In 2010 the scroll was animated for the World Expo, held in Shanghai in 2010. More than 30 times the size of the original, the animation brings this astonishing artwork to life for modern audiences.
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