Picturing art's past

The exhibition, being held from March 10 until April 20, is based on a national cultural and publishing project that has been running for 17 years. Over that period, art historians have established a digital archive of 12,479 ancient Chinese paintings from the pre-Qin period to the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), canvassing more than 260 cultural institutions and museums around the globe and making it the most complete collection of its kind.

The project marks one of the most comprehensive efforts by any country to systematically examine its paintings throughout history and digitalize all of the surviving ones with a view to publishing the results. "Now we are sharing the 'fruits' of this labor with the public," says Ying Jinfei, the other co-curator of the exhibition.