“The moon in the water, the image in the mirror, and the meaning of words are endless.” Taking the meaning from Yan Yu’s “Cang Lang Shi Hua · Shi Bian” of the Song Dynasty, on September 26, the 2021 annual exhibition of the Municipal Museum, “Infinity · Mirror – The Micro World in Ancient Bronze Mirrors”, opened.
“The jade box chats with the mirror open, and the light ashes temporarily wipe away the dust. The light is like a piece of water, and the shadow shines on both sides.” Bronze mirrors have a long history in China, ranging from the earliest water stop and illumination to the casting and appreciation of water, until the emergence of the Qi family culture, and later continued to be used until the Ming and Qing dynasties. For more than 4000 years, bronze mirrors have been an indispensable tool in people’s lives.
This exhibition exhibits a total of 152 pieces (sets), most of which are selected bronze mirror exhibits from museums around Bawu. At the same time, the exhibition also received the full support of collection units and individual collectors such as the Provincial Museum, Fudan University Museum, Huangyan Museum, Anji Museum, etc. The exhibition gathered 18 units and individuals’ exquisite bronze mirrors, spanning over 4000 years from the Shang and Zhou Dynasties to the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Among them, Mr. Wang Ganghuai, a Shanghai bronze mirror collector, lent 36 bronze mirrors, greatly enriching the contents of the exhibits. These bronze mirrors may have beautiful shapes, exquisite patterns, and rich themes; Or the unique and exquisite inscriptions allow the audience to appreciate the lively side of bronze culture.
Entering the exhibition hall, your first impression may be a bit romantic. The entire exhibition form is designed with “Starry Purple” as the main color tone, and uses multi-level metaphors such as color, lighting, and space to create a mysterious, profound, and vast and ethereal exhibition atmosphere. The girl in Hanfu walked past you gently, making people feel like they were wandering through. Mirror houses, animated projections, etc. greatly enhance the audience’s immersion and interactivity when watching the exhibition.
After visiting the exhibition, you will find that it has broken the conventional narrative method of using a single historical timeline as the logical framework for the exhibition. It uses the progressive relationship of “substance personality culture”, and is divided into three major parts: just mirror, not only mirror, and endless mirror. It systematically interprets the connotation of bronze mirrors from their material attributes, social attributes, and cultural attributes. The representative works of bronze mirrors from various eras are in front of us, and the diverse shapes reflect the ingenuity and ingenuity of the ancients.
Facial decoration is a basic understanding of the material properties of copper mirrors, but the origin of copper mirrors is not the use of illumination. For a long time, everyone had a profound understanding of the shape and manufacturing process of bronze mirrors, but there was no consensus on the origin of bronze mirrors. With the deepening of research, the original intention of the creator to cast bronze mirrors thousands of years ago was slowly revealed to the world. The “Just Mirror” unit systematically describes the material properties of copper mirrors from aspects such as their origin, process, and shape. Here, you can see the bronze mirror with a dragon pattern in the Spring and Autumn Period, the bell shaped mirror in the Northern Song Dynasty, and the diamond shaped mirror with a magpie winding around a flower branch in the Tang Dynasty.
Everlasting longing for each other grass leaf mirror in the Western Han Dynasty, King Qin’s mirror in the Sui Dynasty, and the story mirror of Emperor Tang Ming’s moon palace in the Song Dynasty… After thousands of years of changes, the bronze mirror has had a subtle chemical reaction with people. On the basis of basic material foundation, people have endowed bronze mirrors with deeper humanistic connotations, and the relationship between bronze mirrors and the people who use them is closer. The “Not only Mirror” unit distinguishes between the parts of “Guangyi Beauty”, “Mingjing Wang Hou”, “Shangfang Zuo Mirror”, “Shangfang Zuo Mirror”, and “Qingzhi Bronze Flower”, showing the relationship between bronze mirrors and different social groups such as beauties, gentlemen, religious believers, and craftsmen.
Wu Mengyang, Deputy Director of the Exhibition Department of the Municipal Museum, said that the bronze mirror exhibition had been prepared for 18 months. “The reason for choosing the bronze mirror is its daily nature, and there are usually many bronze mirrors in the warehouses of various museums.”
Starting from the beginning of 2020, with the participation of 8 public museums in the city, and in line with the idea of “joint planning, joint design, sharing of collections, and sharing of achievements,” carefully polished, and finally formed a pilot work report exhibition for improving the quality of county-level public museums.
In the afternoon of the same day, in order to cooperate with the opening of the exhibition and enhance its academic and intellectual nature, Huo Hongwei, Vice President of the Research Institute of the National Museum of China, delivered an academic lecture entitled “Exploration of Bronze Mirror Culture from the Perspective of Archaeology”, which covered the origin and conceptual definition of bronze mirrors, the appreciation of archaeological excavations of Chinese bronze mirrors, and the application of archaeological methods in the study of bronze mirrors.
The exhibition will continue until January 4, 2022. Reporter Tang Xuyu Wen/Photograph Xiao Yi/Cartography