"Exemplar - Aesthetic Coding of Ten Scenes of West Lake" exhibition opens in Hangzhou

China News Service, Hangzhou, September 30 (Cao Dan) On September 30, the exhibition "Example - Aesthetic Coding of Ten Scenes of West Lake" opened at the West Lake Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. This year coincides with the 15th anniversary of the "Hangzhou West Lake Cultural Landscape" being included in the World Heritage List. The exhibition uses the ten named landscapes of the West Lake as an entry point to interpret the aesthetic codes hidden among the lakes and mountains.

The World Heritage Committee once evaluated that the "Hangzhou West Lake Cultural Landscape" is an outstanding example of cultural landscape, which very clearly demonstrates the aesthetic ideas of Chinese landscape.

How can a lake create this aesthetic model? This exhibition attempts to answer that question.

The exhibition brings together 122 pieces (sets) of collections from Beijing Summer Palace Management Office, Zhejiang Provincial Museum, China Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing, Xiling Seal Society and other institutions, covering calligraphy and painting, porcelain, study, seals, ancient books and other categories. Among them, the "West Lake Picture" by the Ming Dynasty official was exhibited in Hangzhou for the first time.

A lake of smoke and water, a scene with a name. The ancients condensed the four seasons of West Lake, the light and shadow of dawn and dusk, and the poetry of literati into the short four-character scenic name, sublimating the natural landscape into an aesthetic symbol that can be read, written, and reproduced.

The exhibition consists of five major sections: "Ten Scenes of the Four Seasons, Meaning of Mirror Image, Unbounded Beauty, Forgetting Things and Me, and Misty Rain under an Umbrella." From the poetics of naming, artistic creation, garden communication to daily use of objects, the exhibition systematically sorts out the landscape aesthetic system behind the ten scenes of the West Lake. It also presents the development context of this image being spread northward to royal gardens and eastward to East Asia.

Pan Cangsang, Secretary of the Party Committee and Director of the West Lake Museum in Hangzhou, said that the named landscape is a very representative aesthetic aesthetic of Chinese landscapes, which had reached maturity by the Song Dynasty. “An image is formed from the real scene, and then the name of the scene is refined from the image. The name of the scene in turn gives birth to new paintings and poems. It is a process of constant interaction.”

She said that the exhibition wanted the audience to re-understand the beauty of the West Lake through cultural relics. "It is everywhere and affects our lives, but we may not realize it ourselves."

It is reported that the exhibition period is from October 1st to December 21st.