Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight:
A painting is not something we step into. We might crave a landscape, a room, a street, a scene or a background, but we can’t inhabit the painter’s vision of it. Our eyes inch closer as they focus on areas of the work, but the view stops there: We remain outsiders, left out in the cold.
Nowhere have I felt this as much as in the 10th century Southern Tang era painted scroll The Night Revels of Han Xizai, a work I fell in love with for a special reason: I wanted to be there. I wanted to step inside that painted scroll and move among the participants in the low intimate light of a nighttime gathering—joining what looked to be a mondain salon where socializing was stirred with art and music as the guests sipped tea and other beverages, sat around an ancient booth designed for lively conversation, plopped casually on a king-sized daybed, arm propped on bended knee (a sitting pose I recognize from an old friend), or joined in the music-making with percussion or flute.
There is so much going on in this scroll—a 12th-century copy of the original by Gu Hongzhong—only some of it mysterious.
More here.
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