Song Dynasty (960-1276) paintings undoubtedly marked the heyday of ancient Chinese art and have been widely recognized as treasures of Chinese civilization. To spotlight their legacy, CGTN has launched “The Song, Painted,” an immersive interactive virtual exhibition that features six themes – Children, Style, Stage, Class, Market, and Faith – to decode traditional Chinese aesthetics via the lifestyles depicted in the paintings.
The virtual exhibition presents an immersive interactive tour with Chinese and English voiceover descriptions to slideshows with over 110 Song Dynasty paintings chosen from ten museums in China and around the world, including some renowned works contributed by The Palace Museum, such as Along the River During a Qingming Time (Qingming Shanghe Tu) by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145), The Night Revels of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong (937-975), and Huashan Mountain God in an Epiphany by Li Gonglin (1049-1106).
Figure paintings in the Song Dynasty covered a wide range of genres and subjects and were nothing short of superb depictions of their protagonists, from how they looked and dressed to how they moved and mingled. In order to highly recreate the appearance of the characters in the painting, 2D skeletal animation was created using Adobe Animation CC software, and the ancient painting was disassembled and restored by the designer and made into an animation embedded in the interactive web page.
Six major digital halls of the virtual exhibition will feature a comprehensive image of its relevant category, zooming in on each featured artwork, describing the composition, examining the techniques, interpreting and elaborating on the content, bring paintings sleeping in museums back to life.
In each digital hall, visitors can interact with artworks and exhibits to learn more about the artwork on display. By interacting with the makeup routine buttons inside the “Style” hall, one can experience the beauty of the Song cosmetics, from base foundation to layer application. Swipe through the exhibition hall as if you were in the world inside the scrolls, and the paintings that have been dormant for as long as a thousand years are brought to life. A wide variety of other interaction options are waiting for you to discover.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYyW_AHQBjc
Celebrated Song painting experts and scholars, artists and art curators from renowned institutions such as the Palace Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese National Academy of Arts, the School of Art at Peking University, the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and Pixar Animation Studios have also joined the digital exhibition to share their professional insights, dissects artworks and deciphering the subtle and fascinating stories hidden behind the painted scenes. Find out more in the special section of the cyber exhibition – “Insights.”
To reach global audiences interested in Chinese art and history, the “Song, Painted” multimedia exhibition will be promoted on CGTN’s accounts on domestic and international social media platforms, including Weibo, WeChat, Bilibili, Facebook, YouTube, and the Yangshipin video app, inviting the world to delve into a millennial dream back into an imperial wonderland.
Website: https://statics.cctv.cn/static_new/2022/CGTN/index.html
