Timely Images: Chinese Art Related to Seasonal Festivals

The Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, presents a discussion on seasonal Chinese art.

Seasonal festivals in China were important occasions for the creation, display, and presentation of gifts of art featuring specific, timely images. For example, paintings depicting a bouquet of pomegranate flowers, calamus leaves, and a branch of moxa were appropriate only for the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, also known as the Dragon Boat Festival. Representations of roosters, considered lucky, were associated with the Chinese New Year, while images of a peony and butterfly signaled the Birthday of the Flowers. This lecture by Jan Stuart, keeper of Asia at the British Museum, examines the close bond between a wide range of pictorial arts and their temporal conventions. She explores the role of art in marking the passage of the yearly cycle and how it was folded into China’s abiding rhythms of nature and human culture.