The exhibition rolls out like a Chinese handscroll of mountains and waters. It provides the audience with the experiences of woyou ("lie down and travel") and yibu huanjing ("move to gain different perspectives and appreciate varied scenery") prompted by the ancient Chinese and enhanced by the famous poetic verses on walls.
Visitors are guided through diverse views of the Yangtze's course: its source emerging from the glacial meltwater in the Tangula Mountains of Qinghai province, the docks and mountains of Chongqing covered in thick fog, and blooming plum trees that infuse Taihu Lake in Jiangsu with vitality.
Wei says since the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), "the Yangtze River of Ten Thousand Miles" has become an established landscape format, rendered by painters as a long horizontal scroll depicting one or several river sections. "Great artists, such as Xia Gui of the Southern Song, Wang Meng from the 14th century and Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), adopted the style to capture the majesty of the emerald waters surging forward and the towering mountains on riverbanks."
In the 1950s, Li Xiongcai (1910-2001), a second-generation leader of the Lingnan School that flourished in Guangdong province, expanded the tradition to express human courage in confronting nature. His monumental work, A Picture of Flood Prevention Works in Wuhan, is partially unveiled in the exhibition.
Measuring 28 meters in length, with 18 meters on display, the painting documents efforts to combat catastrophic flooding that struck Wuhan in Hubei in 1954. At the time, Li was teaching at an art school in the city.
Time and again, the Yangtze has borne witness to humanity's resolve, ingenuity and collective strength. The exhibition guides viewers through painterly tributes to major engineering projects that have left indelible marks on the river's epic narrative, including the bridges across the river in Wuhan and Nanjing in Jiangsu, as well as the Gezhouba and Three Gorges dams.
The exhibition concludes with a section where Zhang Wenchao's video work is shown alongside photographs taken by French photographer Bruno Barbey (1941-2020) during his visits to China in 1973 and 1980. Through Barbey's lens, viewers glimpse shifting lifestyles and mentalities shaped by urbanization.
Across media, eras and perspectives, these works celebrate, as all these scholars, poets and artists in history did, the Yangtze as a wonder of nature, a cultural tapestry and a national epic.
