Through the City Scroll: Digital Exhibition

The Hsinchu City Cultural Affairs Bureau, in collaboration with the National Palace Museum, presents Through the City Scroll: NPM × Hsinchu City Digital Exhibition, an exhibition inspired by the cultural concept of yaji, the refined gatherings of literati. Drawing upon selected paintings from the Song and Ming dynasties, the exhibition further explores the architectural and cultural significance of Hsinchu’s historic Qianyuan Garden and Beiguo Garden from the Qing dynasty. By integrating classical artworks with contemporary digital technologies, the exhibition reinterprets the aesthetics and spirit of literati culture. Installed within the Hsinchu City Art Museum, the immersive presentation invites audiences to engage with the intellectual pursuits, daily life, and social rituals of ancient scholars through a multisensory experience.
With the exception of AI Gallery – City Scroll, previously presented at the Osaka–Kansai World Expo, all exhibition content was newly conceived and designed specifically for Hsinchu City, embedding local historical narratives within a digital exhibition framework. Among the interactive installations, Qu Shui Yan (Floating Wine Cups Along a Winding Stream) is adapted from a seminal digital work by the National Palace Museum. For this presentation, the Museum’s curatorial team reexamined historical sources to identify poetic texts connected to Hsinchu’s literati, integrating these verses into the installation. Through this process, audiences encounter not only the visual world of classical painting but also Hsinchu as articulated through literary expression.
Developed collaboratively by the National Palace Museum and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the exhibition approaches art from the perspective of technological aesthetics. It offers renewed engagement with significant works from Taiwan’s cultural heritage while prompting reflection on the evolving role of art in the contemporary city. Within this context, artificial intelligence operates not merely as a display tool, but as an emerging curatorial language that shapes interpretation and experience.
By transforming how audiences enter, perceive, and understand artworks, the exhibition reframes curatorial practice as the generation of conditions for viewing. Through a cross-temporal visual dialogue, it reveals how artistic vocabularies continue to be translated and reinterpreted across changing historical, social, and technological contexts.