Painting Anime

Over the years, National Palace Museum has devoted a great amount of resources to digitalizing the cultural heritage and to designing educational media to give visitors new experience with the ancient artworks. Following the motto ‘forming new vitality for the collections; creating new value for the museum’, the Museum endeavors to deepen the core values of the cultural objects and to bring new inspirations to audiences. Since 2011 the National Palace museum initiated ‘Painting Anime’, which are six series of high-resolution long scroll painting animation. Through the latest technology, four high-resolution 1080 HD projectors seamlessly unfold long scroll paintings on the light wall to present the classical scenery in Chinese paintings. ‘Painting Anime’ reproduced six popular paintings, including Up the River During Qingming (Qing court artists), Spring Morning in the Han Palace (Qiu Ying), Imitating Zhao Bosu's Latter Ode on Red Cliff (Wen Zhengming), Syzygy of the Sun, Moon, and the Five Planets (Xu Yang), Departure Herald (anonymous), Return Clearing (anonymous) and Activities of the Twelve Months (Qing court artists). Inspired by historical material related to the artworks, the six pieces of animations faithfully present the true spirit of the original paintings and their most attractive parts. What makes the Chinese hand-scroll paintings fascinating is how they present the time series without disrupting the continuance of the painting. Because of the special dimension, the compositions usually unfold gradually from right to left. To be precise, the proper way to view a hand-scroll is to unroll with the left hand and roll with the right at the same time, thereby examining one section at a time. However, for practical considerations, fully unrolling a scroll becomes an eclectic or inevitable approach. Painting Anime, therefore, aims to reinterpret paintings while returning our audiences the true experience of appreciating Chinese hand-scrolls.