Choosing Boards In The Tale Of Genji

I think by using the handscroll you can go through the work slowly and take your time which gives your mind time to imagine and absorb the images as it is slowly unrolled, much more like reading a book. You scroll thru like you would turn the pages of a book and take as much time as needed. When you are looking at hanging scrolls you see the work in its entirety and have to take in everything at once. To me hanging scrolls are more for an artwork that is to be viewed in its entirety and with the handscroll it is best for telling a narrative story piece by piece.

Photo from the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya and the Gotoh Museum in Tokyo. A hanging scroll is one of the ways to display and exhibit Chinese painting and calligraphy. The viewer can enjoy the …show more content…
Paintings in China are not usually hung on walls permanently for display. This is partly due to the delicate nature of the ink and color, which would fade if left exposed to light for a long time. The unrolling of a scroll is a ceremonious act. Enthusiasts do not view the painting from a distance, as in the West, but approach close to "read the painting”. The Tale of Genji, the son of an ancient Japanese emperor, is a very long and it is sometimes called the world's first novel. The novel is made up of fifty four chapters and an approximately thirteen hundred pages in the English translation. The novel tells of the life of Genji and the recounts the early years of two of Genji's descendants. It is written on a handscroll. The original scroll was about 450 feet long. It consisted of twenty rolls, contained over 100 paintings, and had over 300 sheets of calligraphy. The surviving scrolls of are not a complete depiction of The Tale of Genji. It consists of only 19 paintings, 65 sheets of text and 9 pages of fragments and amounts to only about 15 percent of the original scroll. The tale ends in mid-sentence very abruptly and inconclusively. Unlike hanging