Flashes of Insight: Aesthetic Principles and the Appreciation of Calligraphy

Chinese painting and calligraphy can be mounted in several formats, among them the handscroll, the album, and the hanging scroll. A handscroll is wider than it is tall and is usually viewed from the right end, so its composition unfolds from right to left; the traditional way was to unroll it with the left hand while rolling it up with the right, a section at a time, rather than laying it all out at once. A frontispiece sits on the right before the painting, and the section after it is left for inscriptions, the colophons. A hanging scroll hangs vertically on a wall and is seen whole; it is not meant to stay up for good, and traditionally it is shown for a while, then rolled up and stored, changed with the season or the occasion. An album gathers small paintings into a single volume. Of the seventeen paintings in the National Palace Museum's A Keen Eye, nine are handscrolls, six hanging scrolls, and two album leaves: the longest, Pu Ru's Evening Glow over a River Village, measures 1,192.5 cm wide and 49 cm high, and the tallest, Zhang Daqian's Wide River, Distant Mountains, is a hanging scroll 194.3 cm high.

Check whether the label says handscroll, hanging scroll, or album: walk a handscroll from right to left a section at a time; with a hanging scroll, step back to see it whole, then come close for the details.

Does this painting ask you to stand still and take it in at once, or to move along as it unrolls?