Art Chowder November | December, Issue 18 | Page 22

A
bout 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty in China, a
promising young artist by the name of Zhang Zeduan undertook
a massive and singular project - “Along the River During Qin-
gming Festival.” In a colophon written a few decades after the
enormously detailed painting was completed, it was described
as “inspired,” and the person lucky enough to be its owner was
exhorted to treasure it. Very little is known about the artist any-
more. Yet a millennium later this one work exists in nearly mint
condition, and gives us more information about quotidian life-
style, customs, and culture in the Northern Song Dynasty than
any other resource. If cameras had existed at the time they could
not have done such sweeping justice. Some scholars suggest that
the town depicted is not even a proper place but an idealization
of what towns generally looked like at the time and, maybe more
significantly, how towns generally seemed. It has been declared
a national treasure of China and is fairly inarguably the most
famous and prized historical work of art in all of Eastern Asia.
Alexander Chen described it to me as a “history dictionary.”
Now fast forward through the centuries with me to the mid-
1950’s, when Alexander was a boy of four, huddled with
his friends around the thrilling historical stories of “The
Three Kingdoms,” telling and retelling tales of heroes
like the handsome lover-warrior Lü Bu, and the wily and
determined Cao Cao. Suddenly, with an exhilaration too
limited to children, they begin to draw. The import and
intent of the story — how you ought to feel about it —
came so much more eloquently with a drawing, one could
just look and understand at once what the artist wished to
convey about the scene and the characters in it. Alexander
told me he thinks those stories “made” a lot of artists in
China, Korea, Japan, and probably many other places, too.
The stories are as famous in the East as Shakespeare is in
the West.
Go with me now to 1993, a time of Alexander’s first in-
troduction to New York City and Times Square. Standing
awestruck in the very middle of the buzz and bling, he
became so excited that he kicked off his series entitled
“Alexander’s World” with a depiction of his impressions
that took only one month to complete. This may seem like
a long time until it is explained that most of his cityscapes
take up to three months. If you visit http://www.alexan-
derchen.com you can discover a wonderful little interac-
tive map where nearly 500 digital pins have been stuck,
indicating spots on the globe he has visited and painted as
a sort of artistic chronicler. When he talks about his work
he doesn’t say he paints — he calls it “recording history.”
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ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_the_River_During_the_Qingming_Festival
Detailed section of “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”, also known
by its Chinese name as the Qingming Shanghe Tu, is a painting by the Song dy-
nasty artist Zhang Zeduan. It captures the daily life of people and the landscape
of the capital, Bianjing (present-day Kaifeng) during the Northern Song.