Qiu’s Notes On The Lantern Festival Scroll Project: Painting

Qiu’s Notes on the Lantern Festival Scroll Project: Painting is part of Qiu Zhijie’s major mixed-media art project Qiu’s Notes on the Lantern Festival Scroll Project. Beginning with Lantern Festival Scroll, a city genre painting by an anonymous painter in the mid- to late Ming dynasty, Qiu’s project encompasses a series of writings, paintings, installations, and theatre performances. Lantern Festival Scroll depicts a street scene during the Lantern Festival in Nanjing. The colourful lanterns in the painting create a festive atmosphere appropriate for welcoming spring. The painting is crowded with gentlemen, merchants, and ordinary city dwellers, as well as a rich and varied array of buildings, vessels, and scenes. The painting has immense historical value, showing folk traditions and art and craft techniques; it is also valuable evidence of flourishing urban society in ancient China.

Qiu Zhijie began researching Lantern Festival Scroll in 2009, presenting the results of his research in Qiu’s Notes on the Lantern Festival Scroll Project. He took a contemporary perspective in re-interpreting this Ming- dynasty cityscape. From this painting, he attempted to extract the hidden DNA of Chinese culture and looked for a contemporary way to depict them. In Qiu’s Notes on the Lantern Festival Scroll Project: Painting, Qiu Zhijie transforms the characters, elements, phenomena, and models that repeatedly appear in Chinese history into exquisite drawings, which have in turn provided the larger framework for his research. The work reflects a historical narrative method and a typographic illustration of Chinese history.