The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Photo: Dirk Fleischmann

Dirk Fleischmann

*1974 in Schweinfurt/Germany, lives and works in Seoul

Dirk Fleischmann graduated from the Städelschule art academy (Frankfurt a.M.) in 2002. Since 2009 he has been living in Seoul. He is teaching art at Cheongju University, Korea. In 2010 Fleischmann had a solo exhibition at the Bielefelder Kunstverein. He participated in exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation (2012),  Gwangju Design Biennale (2011), Kunstverein Hannover (2011) and Leeum Museum, Seoul (2010). Website of the artist: www.dirkfleischmann.net

Participatory and processual art practices represent challenges for museums, and these have become an issue over the past decades in occidental art. The Do Not Touch imperative affects how visitors may experience art in museums.

I would like to share some ideas about a phenomenon from the East Asian painting tradition that poses a similar challenge. It is about handscrolls. I find it intriguing to see how ancient viewers had the possibility to get involved, but how modern museums have made any interaction impossible.

A handscroll is a paper roll that was traditionally kept in a box when not being viewed. Looking at a handscroll would require to unfold it. A traditional handscroll could be as long as 12 metres wide and was meant to invite viewers on an imaginary journey through the depicted landscape. Thus ancient scholars would not view it in its entirety but, rather roll it out and expose the painting bit by bit, like a narrative. This would imply that only a few people were involved in the contemplation, which also meant that the viewing experience was an intimate situation. The following picture is an example of how ancient scholars would collectively experience art.

Sheng Mao-yeh (active 1594–1640), Chinese, Ming dynasty, 1368–1644, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering, 1621 (detail), handscroll, ink and color on silk, 12 3/8 x 86 inches, collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art

Problems occur when exposing handscrolls in museums. Viewing a handscroll is meant to be a processual and dynamic experience where there is movement involved. For the sake of preservation this is prohibited in museums and the handscroll remains static and disconnected from the viewer. In fact, many curators choose to display handscrolls completely unfolded. This means that the epic lightness of a lengthy handscroll may change in a monumental wall to wall installation. This will give a wrong impression of the function of handscrolls. Instead of being meant to fill museum spaces, they were designed to be coiled up and stored in boxes.

As described above a handscroll is a light weight paper roll which is easy to transport. It is astonishing to learn that handscrolls might actually have been sent like letters between scholars and friends. That is what I learned when I asked my students in Korea about the hand written texts in the paintings.

A good example is »Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains« by Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322), Yüan dynasty (1279-1368).

Screenshot of the website of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan - click image to access the website

This painting appears to be 28 x 90 cm in size. But when one enlarges the image on the internet, extra meters of added paper on the left side of the painting can be seen alongside texts and seals.
»…These may be comments written by friends of the artist or the collector; they may have been written by viewers from later generations. The colophons may comment on the quality of the painting, express the rhapsody (rarely the disenchantment) of the viewer, give a biographical sketch of the artist, place the painting within an art-historical context, or engage with the texts of earlier colophons. And as a final way of making their presence known, the painter, the collectors, the one-time viewers often "sign" the image or colophons with personal seals bearing their names, these red marks of varying size conveying pride of authorship or ownership…« (from www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chhs/hd_chhs.htm )

I find it fascinating to see how the discourse about the painting becomes a physical part of the art work. The comments of the viewers may be directly written into the landscape. For more space to write additional comments one would glue on another piece of paper. These intimate processes of discourse would last for decades or centuries but would halt should the piece enter a museum collection. This exemplifies a paradox in preservation efforts as sustaining such a lively process is not possible in a museum collection and would be lost forever.

Also the reproduction of handscrolls is difficult because the aspect ratio is not compatible with regular forms of representation. It is worthwhile to have a closer look at how different museum websites handle the visual representation of the wide proportions of handscrolls. In contrast to the above example from the National Palace Museum in Taipei where the entire painting may be scrolled from one end to another and zoomed in and out, the Detroit Institute Of Arts gives only a limited opportunity to see the handscroll in detail and does not take advantage of the scrolling features:

Screenshot of the website of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA - click image to access the website

The »Ten Thousand Miles along the Yellow River«, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1690–1722 China (Two handscrolls: ink, color, and gold on silk; (78 cm x 1285 cm) at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York is a good example of how some websites try to appeal to our Western expectations by ignoring parts of the work. The website cuts off ten meters of content on both sides of the original piece and reduces the handscroll to the painted part only:

Screenshot of the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA - click image to access the website

In contrast to that I would like to share another wonderful handscroll depicting the Yangtze River. I would like to emphasise the huge size of 22517 × 470 pixels, which is over ten times the width of a regular computer screen.

Screenshot of the website www.wikimedia.org - click image to access the website

I find it interesting that the viewing experience on the Internet is closer to how it was originally meant to be. Also a blog where viewers can leave comments is comparable to the way comments were added to the handscrolls traditionally. However, what was once a personal exchange between very few individuals may now be on public display or shared on the internet. The intimacy has been lost.

Further links:
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chhs/hd_chhs.htm
www.npm.gov.tw/english/exhbition/ehan0101/ehan0101.htm
scrolls.uchicago.edu
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handscroll