THE WOMEN LEAVE. THE SEALS STAY. 只是朱顏改

After Zhou Wenju, In the Palace. Song dynasty copy, before 1140. The Met, Open Access. Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40004 Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/projects/ns72hzhvj0sysrbq51ew51cgy18dnpjh

Zhou Wenju was court painter to Li Yu, the last emperor of Southern Tang. These are the women of his palace. When the Song armies took his kingdom, Li Yu was carried into captivity, and there he wrote the ci poem 虞美人 for the palace he would never see again: 雕欄玉砌應猶在，只是朱顏改. The carved railings and jade steps must still be there. Only the faces have changed.

That line is the whole film. I let the women come to life in their own ink lines and walk out of the painting, one by one, until only the empty silk remains. Everything he named as lasting stays: the weave, the stains, and the red seals of the men who owned the scroll for a thousand years. Only the people are gone. His grief as a fallen emperor was that the walls outlive the people inside them, and the painting now does exactly that. One guqin note falls for each woman who leaves.

The closing couplet is not a font. Every character is 集字, collected one by one from brush originals, the way the Tang monk Huairen built the 聖教序 from Wang Xizhi's own hand. Nine of the twelve come from stone-stele collections of Wang Xizhi (集王聖教序, 興福寺半截碑, 普覺國師碑). The three he never wrote, 雕 欄 砌, are borrowed from Zhao Mengfu and Wen Zhengming, who both spent their lives learning his line.

Made in FLORA. #floramuseumchallenge — Lois Liao / Oni On