Students Collaborate on Long Museum Exhibition

On the dark terrace of the Long Museum, armed with calligraphy brushes and buckets of ink, Jian-Jun Zhang, Barbara Edelstein and their students braced through the biting cold to paint the night away.

“Vestiges of a Process: Flowing Ancient Poem,” is Zhang and Edelstein’s art installation at the Long Museum which is part of the Shanghai Drama Institute’s 70-year grand art event, "Revelation and Expansion.”

The artists collaborated with 15 students from their Introduction to Studio Art class on November 26 as part of the artwork’s concept of an overlapping poetic dialogue. Lending individual calligraphy styles to the installation, the student contribution became a cross-cultural representation of the poem’s continuance.

Moving around giant wooden blocks as canvas, the artists used their own writing styles to ink characters from the ancient poem, "Qianziwen" (千字文) as a foundation of the work. Varying in size and intensity, the characters told a unique collaborative story to what was once blank space. This continuation of the poem symbolized the link between past and present flowing into the future.

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