The Dragon-Boat Race Paintings of Song and Yuan Dynasties — Searching for The Dragon-Boat Race in The West Lake Attributed to Zhang Zeduan 宋元龙舟题材绘画研究—以寻找张择端《西湖争标图》卷为例
Time: Monday 28th May 2018, 15:00-17:00
Venue: Hunter Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9DF
This lecture aims to reconstruct the influence of Northern Song painter Zhang Zeduan, the artist of The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival (清明上河图) and The Dragon-Boat Race in The West Lake (西湖争标图), to the Southern Song and Yuan court painters. The postscript by Zhang Zhun of the Yuan dynasty suggests that both hand scrolls attributed to Zhang Zeduan remain in the collection of the Yuan court before 1351. It is inferred in the thesis that the hand scroll of Dragon-Boat Race (龙舟夺标图) in the collection of the Palace Museum that is most likely created by Yuan court artist Wang Zhenpeng whose paradigm much influenced many works of the common theme during the Yuan dynasty, took after the climax of The Dragon-Boat Race in The West Lake of Zhang Zeduan. While The Dragon-Boat Race in The West Lake is now lost, the album of Dragon-Boat Regatta in Jinmingchi Lake (金明池争标图) in the collection of Tianjin Museum, possibly made by Liu Songnian of the Southern Song court, offers a scope to our study of the typical mode of dragon-boat race painting prior to the fourteenth century. Through a comparative analysis of such dragon-boat race paintings, this study traces the development of dragon-boat race as a painting genre, and in turn the reconstruction of the theme furthers our understanding of the socio-political context behind these festive races.
Speaker: Prof. Hui YU is a Senior Curator and Director, Research Institute, Palace Museum Beijing, Heinz-Götze-Visiting Professor of Chinese Art History, University of Heidelberg.
*The lecture will be given in Chinese with English-text supplement.