A Day in an Open City: A Journey Through “Springtime Along the River” – Exhibition

With the upcoming exhibition “A day in an open city”, curator Beatrice Leanza invites us to explore the relationship between ancient Chinese Song history and contemporary urban life and visual culture. A hand-scroll painting “Springtime along the river” (清明上河图 qingming shanghe tu) attributed to the artist Zhang Zeduan and completed around the beginning of the 11th century, is at the heart of the exhibition. Key representation of the Chinese urban culture, it captures the daily life in Dongjing (today Kaifeng city) when the metropolis was the capital city of the Northern Song Dynasty; this masterpiece of literary and visual depiction testifies the cultural, economic and social ecologies of the city at that time. Beyond the cultural richness that characterized this Song China’ scroll, the meticulously researched panorama of this exhibition deals with urban evolutions and transformations.  

Hold from July 26 to August 25 at the Asian World Expo in Hong Kong, the exhibition itself is structured in two parts. First, it presents the “making of” process of a digital animation about the painting together with an introduction to the historical background of the masterpiece. The second and main part of the show is composed of eight core scenes from the scroll itself, covering key subjects of Song Culture and notably related to architecture, urbanism and building environment. Ten installations by designers currently active in China broaden this section by focusing on particular aspects of Song Culture in the contemporary perspective.