Cathy's Art Diary

Moving exhibition at the British Library looking at Dunhuang in north east China which was established in 111 BCE as a military outpost and became a vital stop on the Silk Roads. Most of the documents and objects were discovered in the Mogao Library Cave. Discovered in 1900 the cave included tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and other objects dating from the 5th to 11th century. The show was arranged by specific, usually named, individuals who represented a type of person or an aspect the culture there such as a trader, a fortune teller and a printer. This brought the often slightly plain looking documents to life. It is a lovely companion show to the Silk Roads at the British Museum which mentions this find. The most moving exhibit is a letter found in a lost mailbag and therefore never sent, written a merchant’s wife to her husband who she had not heard from in the years. Closed 23 February 2025  

Fascinating online lecture from the British Museum explaining their current exhibition on the Silk Roads. I’d enjoyed the exhibition but it was useful to learn a bit more about how it was structured. I had spotted that the show was in geographical zones which roughly made it chronological but had missed that within this were six case studies looking at a topic in more detail. Sue Brunning and Yu Ping Luk, the curators, took us on a whistle stop tour of the show pointing out the star exhibits and explaining why they were chosen. They also explained how the show goes beyond the norms of the museum by drawing objects from all departments as well as borrowing items from 29 international lenders, many of whom had never lent to the British Museum before.

Amazing exhibition at the British Museum looking in detail at the concept of the silk roads. Think of it more as the story of trade in the 1st millennium going geographically from Japan to Ireland. It looked at trade in both directions as well as the spread of religions along the routes. There were some breath taking   pieces such as the earliest known chess pieces, an ivory casket which pairs the Magi with Wheland the Smithy and had Romulus and Remus on one side, a lovely Cosimo and Damian and a Chinese shoe dated about 700AD. It told the story fairly clearly but it was a complex and interwoven narrative and I think I’ll need to come again at least once to get it straight in my mind. It suffered a bit from slow readers many of which seemed to be from the countries represented and I suspect might have been translating the labels. Closes 23 February 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard    

Excellent two day online course from ARTScapades looking at the history of the Silk Roads and how ideas as well as goods travelled along them. Susan Whilfield from the University of East Anglia guided us through starting with an overview of the history of the routes and the religions which operated along them. She pointed that the routes were a lot wider than usually thought and stretch into Japan at one side and Scandinavia at the other. She then went on to talk about silk itself and how its trade and production travelled along the routes starting in China. She talked about the different qualities of silk that were produced. One the second day she looked at the role of pilgrimages, both Christian and Buddhist, in spreading ideas and bringing goods and souvenirs back. I was fascinated by a Buddhist statue which had been found in Scandinavia with signs that it had been displayed in the same was as they displayed Norse gods. Finally she focused on four objects looking at their t...