A Shadow Puppet Exibition at China Art National Museum (2007)

Thanks to Picasa (and other Internet sites) now is possible to publish Slideshows of any groups of photographs without a problem of space in the Blog, so I decided to retake some important events and dedicate some posts especially for showing the whole group of photographs I took of them.

You already have seen a Slideshow of "Tenjin Matsuri Festival" in Osaka in 2006, and this time I want to show more photogrpahs from this shadow puppet exhibition ocurred in 2007. The post referred to it was published on August 15th, 2007: http://gustavothomastheatre.blogspot.com/2007/08/chinese-shadow-puppet-exhibition-in.html

This was a very special exhibition in China, for first time there were showed in one place such amount of Puppets from the last two dinasties and from all over China.

if the photographs are not well displayed just click on the window and you will be redirected to the Picasa page.

Chinese Shadow Puppet Exhibition in Beijing.

As I promised here you have several photographs and two long videos (10 minutes each) with dozens of images of this Shadow puppet Exhibition at the National Museum of Art in Beijing.

During July and August were exhibited more than 500 of the most beautiful shadow theatre puppets from the museum collection; so, you will see pieces of art made by leather, color and imagination.

These puppets come from many areas of China mainly from those places with big Shadow Theater tradition: Sha'anxi, Fujian, Hunan and Beijing. Dates of manufacturing vary but we have many from the Qing dynasty (17th to 20th century) and many other from the republican and communism era.

We can enjoy very well these images as artistic objects, even without thinking about them as part of the performing art they were made for. You will also notice that many puppets got movable arms and legs, and those who didn't got them it was because they only served as "extras" or "scenery".

video I Chinese Shadow Puppet Exhibition


video II Chinese Shadow Puppet Exhibition