Journey to the East
Chinese Rooftile, Copyright; British Museum
Production: Journey to the East
Venue: York City Art Gallery
Rating: ****
Run: May 22 – September 8 2010
Playing on the words of the classic Chinese novel ‘Journey to the West’, the York Art Gallery’s newest exhibition, ‘Journey to the East’, encourages visitors to embark on their own journey of discovery into the Far East. A Ming dynasty (1368-1644) statue of Zhu Bajie (the pig-demon character from ‘Journey to the West’) is just 1 of over 100 fascinating artefacts on loan from the British Museum on display. Ranging from within 3000 years of Chinese culture, these artefacts are here brought together in celebration of the traditions and inventive achievements of Chinese civilisation.
The exhibition is segmented into the five themes of food and drink, play and performance, language and writing, festivals and beliefs, and technology. As such, it presents a wide breadth of introduction to Chinese cultural tradition. Among these avenues of learning are key historical Chinese inventions, such as the printing press, the compass, gunpowder, and the folding umbrella, as well as burial traditions, like that of burying a loved one with food and miniature furniture.
The exhibition’s cabinet-displays occasionally combine Chinese antiquities from the British Museum collection with artifacts of contemporary Chinese creation, and almost always there are highly visible and functional similarities between the old and new- indicating enduring traditions and values into modern times.
Although ‘Journey to the East’ at York Art Gallery is fundamentally the penultimate point of a touring exhibition of Chinese artifacts from the British Museum , the exhibition also operates on a local level , by providing an exploration into contemporary Chinese life in York through the photographs of Yan Preston. Yan’s snapshots of the daily life of Chinese people living and working in York provide a glimpse into the continuity of ancient traditions in Chinese culture. Borrowing from the Chinese-life-in-York display, part of York Castle Museum’s ongoing ‘Chinese Reflections’ exhibition.
Whilst the every-day subject-matter of Yan Preston’s photographs may disappoint art-fans, perhaps seeming too mundane for the amount of exhibition-space they take up, they certainly work well in demonstrating the evolution of Chinese cultural traditions and values in a contemporary context.
Journey to the East has also employed a good range of enjoyable interactive activities; visitors can enjoy traditional Chinese picture-books and Yan Preston’s photographs in book-form within a comfy reading area, along with a Chinese chess-board and accompanying instructions. In addition, using traditionally-styled Chinese shadow-puppets, visitors can create their own shadow-puppet shows in a specially-made puppet theatre.
By-and-large, ‘Journey to the East’ presents a celebration of the inventions and endurance of the Chinese civilisation, and its continuance in its ancient traditions and artistic values through time, and even across into countries of wildly different history and traditions.
The ‘Journey to the East’ exhibition is running at York Art Gallery until September 2010, and admission is free.
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