Past Exhibitions
- Medieval Fan Paintings
- February 10, 2015 - March 15, 2015
This exhibition features masterworks of fan painting. Today, with the ubiquitous presence of air conditioning, the use of folding fans has decreased dramatically; however, in olden times fans were made in enormous quantities and given as gifts for significant life events. Many such fans had skillfully depicted paintings on a variety of subjects. Fans served as small, portable works of art. After exhausting their function as practical objects, painted fan papers were often transformed into new formats—remounted as hanging scrolls, pasted onto folding screens, or mounted into albums—extending their lives as artworks for visual appreciation.