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THE HORSE NEVER MOVED. THE OWNERS KEPT ARRIVING.
忍使驊騮氣凋喪
Night-Shining White (照夜白), Han Gan. Tang dynasty, ca. 750. Handscroll, ink on paper. The Met, Open Access.
Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39901
Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/projects/ns745va0msznfd8eb3rx5v2rpn8dnt3m
Around 750, Han Gan painted Night-Shining White, the favourite horse of Emperor Xuanzong. Tethered to a post, rearing, straining at the rope, never getting free. This film runs the next twelve hundred years forward. The horse strains, and one by one the real seals and inscriptions arrive in the exact order history added them: the Tang connoisseur Zhang Yanyuan; Li Yu, the last emperor of Southern Tang, who brushed the horse's name at the top; Mi Fu; the Song minister Jia Sidao; eleven Yuan scholars; the Ming collector Xiang Yuanbian; the Qianlong Emperor, stamping it again and again, until the paper is crowded red. The horse never breaks loose. The last mark of all is the museum.
Nothing on the paper is invented. Every seal is the real one, cut from the scan and returned to its own place in the sequence; the horse moves only in the ink lines Han Gan already drew. The closing couplet is Du Fu's, on Han Gan himself: 幹惟畫肉不畫骨,忍使驊騮氣凋喪, "he painted only the flesh, never the bone, and so let the noble courser's spirit waste away." It is not a font. Every character is 集字, collected from brush originals. A companion to In the Palace: there the people leave and the seals stay; here the animal stays, and the owners keep coming.
Made in FLORA. #floramuseumchallenge
Lois Liao / Oni On
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