Preface by Ina Asim

New Life for an Old Painting

Several years ago I contacted Mr. Jeff Hsu in Taibei about a piece of art in his collection that has fascinated me ever since. It was the seventeenth century handscroll of the Lantern Festival in Nanjing by an anonymous painter. The scroll is titled ‘Shangyuan dengcai(tu) ’ ‘Colorful Lanterns at Shangyuan’, title that it was given by the eminent art historian Xu Bangda.

Mr. Hsu instantly wrote back to me and without hesitation provided me with photographs of the painting without asking for anything but for a copy of the book to be published. Such generosity is extremely rare to find and therefore I owe Mr. Hsu my deepest gratitude.

As I started working with his photographs I learned a lot about the details of the painting but sometimes wished I could enlarge them to see with greater clarity. In the meantime I had made a professional transition from Würzburg University in Germany to the University of Oregon. Here the work on the scroll developed in a new direction and took on a different dimension. With the technical equipment available at the University of Oregon the painting could be electronically cleaned, a process which enhanced the ‘readability’ of the scroll to a degree I could not have dreamed off.

Coincidence and luck helped me to find a dream team of collaborators in a very short time. Su-chen Chang provided much more than a translation of the texts for the bilingual comments on the CD and the manual, she also adapted the texts for a Chinese audience with great care and precision. When Mr. Hsu generously offered to loan the painting to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon she was in charge of the correspondence, a task that brought her more than one sleepless night in which she effortlessly bridged not only the difference between Pacific Time and Taibei gallery hours and but also the differences in juridical regulations for art loans.

Garron Hale cleaned the painting electronically from the darkening process the painting had suffered over the centuries. With utmost attention to detail he electronically ‘washed’ the painting in a painstaking process that left the original untouched and produced the brilliant and precise reproduction you find on the CD. He is the designer of the elegant layout, the viewer-friendly navigation of the various functions hidden in the menus, and the manual. To Su-chen and Garron: my heartfelt thanks for your idealism and unconditional support! Without you the CD project would not have been possible.

I am much obliged to Cathleen Leué and Maram Epstein who revised the manuscript with scrutinizing eyes and polished my phrases into decent English. Lori O’Hollaren was a wizard in securing our financial survival. Brian Floyd programmed countless ideas into practical applications and Jacob Bartruff spent nights on the adaptation of maps from the Ming for us modern viewers. Yu Mueller-Chiu came from Germany and joined Brian Hebb to give their fine voices to the invitation that the painter extends to us:
Join the celebration of an old tradition and preserve its riches for posterity – they are the roots of the future!

For quick reference the texts in the manual are identical with the texts on the CD. Some of the explanations of details repeat information that appears in the longer texts. Thus the CD viewer does not have to read the longer background texts before viewing details of the painting.
Any errors are my responsibility. For comments and critique please contact me at:

Ina Asim
Department of History
University of Oregon
317 McKenzie Hall
Eugene, OR 97403
USA
Email: inaasim@uoregon.edu
Ina Asim Eugene, September 2004