Voyaging to reveal the verse

Back in the late 1980s, Zhu Yuebing, a scholar from Shaoxing in Zhejiang province with a passion for Tang Dynasty (618-907) poetry, started a research movement dubbed "the trail of Tang poems", in which he and others interested in the topic spent time studying places the ancient poets had visited in Zhejiang, a region of mighty mountains and rivers, and the poems they composed en route. It was a thought-provoking look at the literary brilliance of the Tang empire from the perspective of the environment, history and the cultural heritage of Zhejiang, and especially of its eastern region, from where Zhu hailed.

In 2020, a year after the scholar passed away, artists and curators at the China Academy of Art, in Zhejiang's provincial capital of Hangzhou, were motivated by his devotion to Tang poetry to start their travel and art project, The Way to Poetry, in honor of his spirit.

They have expanded the area of research beyond Zhejiang and Zhu's hometown to regions outside the province, and earlier this year, to Dunhuang and other places in Gansu province.

The artists, themselves teachers at the China Academy of Art, have traced how the ancient poets addressed the landscapes they saw, and how the scenes captured in their classic poems, maybe having changed a great deal since then, continue to inspire people today.

A selection of the work produced as part of the project over the past three years is now on show at Mountain Trail of Infinite Longing, an exhibition being held at the Gallery of Calligraphy and Painting Channel in Beijing's Olympic Forest Park until Dec 21. The paintings, calligraphy, prints, installations, videos and pieces co-created using artificial intelligence show the passing of time, allowing visitors to see the landscapes as the artists did, as well as experience the way they felt about them.

The exhibition encourages people to examine the spiritual nature of poetry and human beings, says Gao Shiming, dean of the China Academy of Art, through which, like the artists, they are able to enter into a dialogue with these historical luminaries and develop new thoughts and ideas about what they were doing.