Voyaging to reveal the verse

Back in the late 1980s, Zhu Yuebing, a scholar from Shaoxing in Zhejiang province with a passion for Tang Dynasty (618-907) poetry, started a research movement dubbed "the trail of Tang poems", in which he and others interested in the topic spent time studying places the ancient poets had visited in Zhejiang, a region of mighty mountains and rivers, and the poems they composed en route. It was a thought-provoking look at the literary brilliance of the Tang empire from the perspective of the environment, history and the cultural heritage of Zhejiang, and especially of its eastern region, from where Zhu hailed.

In 2020, a year after the scholar passed away, artists and curators at the China Academy of Art, in Zhejiang's provincial capital of Hangzhou, were motivated by his devotion to Tang poetry to start their travel and art project, The Way to Poetry, in honor of his spirit.

They have expanded the area of research beyond Zhejiang and Zhu's hometown to regions outside the province, and earlier this year, to Dunhuang and other places in Gansu province.

The artists, themselves teachers at the China Academy of Art, have traced how the ancient poets addressed the landscapes they saw, and how the scenes captured in their classic poems, maybe having changed a great deal since then, continue to inspire people today.

A selection of the work produced as part of the project over the past three years is now on show at Mountain Trail of Infinite Longing, an exhibition being held at the Gallery of Calligraphy and Painting Channel in Beijing's Olympic Forest Park until Dec 21. The paintings, calligraphy, prints, installations, videos and pieces co-created using artificial intelligence show the passing of time, allowing visitors to see the landscapes as the artists did, as well as experience the way they felt about them.

The exhibition encourages people to examine the spiritual nature of poetry and human beings, says Gao Shiming, dean of the China Academy of Art, through which, like the artists, they are able to enter into a dialogue with these historical luminaries and develop new thoughts and ideas about what they were doing.

The most recently completed pieces on show were made during and after a journey to Dunhuang this July and August to trace sites in Northwest China that were visited by the ancient poets, and about which they composed poems.

In the vast desert near the Mingsha Mountain (or Singing Sand Dunes), Shen Linfeng, a calligraphy teacher and member of the exhibition's curatorial team, wrote a text by Ban Gu, a scholar-official who lived in the first century, on a 200-meter vertical scroll. A video recording the process, The Sea of Time, can be seen at the exhibition.

"As I was working on the paper, my mind was full of scenes in which these poets, when they reached the distant region, marveled at the vastness of the land and recited poems out loud to express their mixed feelings and their presence in the universe," Shen says.

Han Xu, deputy dean of the China Academy of Art, says that poetry extracts the purest essence of culture, its best and most spiritual parts.

"As we set out to trace the steps of ancient poets, we have been able to touch upon the multiple dimensions of Tang poetry through innovation in the exhibition's approach, as well as the magnificence of our culture," Han says.

Liu Haiyong, a professor at the China Academy of Art and the exhibition's chief curator, says the exhibition also shows similarly themed works by well-known artists from Beijing; for example, Qiu Zhijie, who, in his painting A Poetic Depiction of the Yellow River, creates a Yellow River landscape by including classic verses from history hailing its majestic views.

The exhibition will also be on display in Dunhuang for five months next year.