How the Song-dynasty Qingming Scroll Inspired “The New Qingming Scroll”

In 2014, the Chinese artist Dai Xiang completed a photo montage that portrayed modern Chinese people in actual situations against the backdrop of the landscape of the Song-dynasty scroll entitled the Qingming shanghe tu (often translated as “Going Up River on the Qingming Festival”), traditionally attributed to Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). In this talk, Dai will explain why the Qingming scroll lends itself to reinterpretation and give the historical background of the situations he showed in the New Qingming scroll. He will also briefly introduce the technology he used to make the photo montage (Dai changed costumes to portray some 90 of the 1000 people who appear in the scroll). Although the original work is 82 feet long, at Yale, Dai will display a smaller version that is over 26 feet long.

The talk will be in Chinese with English summaries. Dai welcomes questions in the Q+A session after the talk in Chinese and English, which will be translated into Chinese.

For more about Dai Xiang and his New Qingming scroll, please see: https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/dai-…