Scrolling

The first room of the China exhibition at the Royal Academy contains marvellous scrolls that show the progress of the Qianlong emperor on one of his tours of his kingdom. On his return to Beijing in 1751 he commissioned the scrolls, and they were finished in 1770, in time for his 60th birthday. There are 12 and they amount to 500 feet long – of course only a small section (30 feet?) is on display. They are a delight – but you can spend so long looking at just one that you’ve used up your attention span without seeing the rest of the exhibition.

This scan from the RA Magazine gives an idea (but of course as it’s so far removed from the original, the colours are off and details fuzzy).


In the article, David Hockney says: “The fact that the scroll cannot be reproduced in a book should tell us it has modern relatives – the more recent kind of ‘scroll art’ that we see in movies and video. But the ancient scroll, which is unfurled by the viewer, offers more possibilities for viewer participation than a film in which the cameraman decides what we see.”

The viewer isn’t static, unrolling the scroll, as in life: our eyes move all over the place. The isometric perspective used doesn’t have a vanishing point. If it had a vanishing point (as in Western perspective) “the viewer would be a pinpoint in front of the picture instead of a physical participant in the viewing of the scroll... The Chinese method of painting is more narrative, more attuned to the movements of the viewer’s eye and body and their psychological engagement with the story they are unfurling.”

As part of a course based around the Chinese galleries at the V&A (in 1994 or so), we saw a video of Hockney looking at and talking about a Chinese scroll. He may have mentioned how elements like fog help with that feeling of moving through space. At the time I went home and “evoked” fog among the buildings with some tissue paper and the financial pages from the newspaper: