CUHK Art Museum celebrates the grand opening of its new extension and gallery, the Lo Kwee Seong Pavilion and Harold and Christina Lee Gallery, with a special exhibition, “Transcending Transience: Art and Culture of Late Ming Jiangnan”.

The exhibition, in collaboration with the Shanghai Museum and the CUHK Department of Fine Arts, is the largest ever curated by the Art Museum. Sponsored by Bei Shan Tang Foundation, the exhibition features 193 precious art objects including paintings, calligraphy works and antiquities sourced from prominent local and international collections, including those from the Shanghai Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Hong Kong Museum of Art.

The collections reveal the vibrant cultural landscape of the Jiangnan region, lying south of the Yangtze River, during the late Ming period (late 16^th to mid-17^th century). While this period was wrought with political instability and dynastic change, Jiangnan remained the most affluent region where scholars and gentry cultivated and aspired to an elegant lifestyle in a liberal atmosphere.

With a usable floor area of 1,770 square metres, the new extension has ample room to elegantly showcase large-scale artworks from the prized collections. You Qiu’s Spring Morning in the Han Palace, for instance, is a handscroll with explicit depictions of the exploits and rendezvous of the famed beauty Zhao Feiyan in and out of the palace. Commissioned by a learned scholar, the handscroll on loan from the Shanghai Museum is celebrated for its intricate brushstrokes and elegant portrayal of the femme fatale trope.

The exhibition also features Zhang Hong’s Zhi Garden, a precious collection from the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In the first page of his album, the accomplished landscape and figure painter renders the Zhi Garden in aerial view, taking a unique visual perspective to showcase the beauty of Chinese classical gardens from a fresh angle.