Album, Folio and Fan Formats

About

Albums gather paintings or pieces of calligraphy, often eight or twelve leaves, mounted concertina-style or bound, so that a viewer turns through landscapes, flowers or poems one at a time, at a table rather than on a wall. Southern Song court painters such as Ma Yuan and Xia Gui worked at this intimate scale in the 12th and 13th centuries, and Qing artists from Wang Hui to Bada Shanren kept the album central.

Fans set a harder problem. A round silk fan needs a composition that sits inside a circle; a folding fan spreads the picture across an arc broken by ribs, and flattened examples keep the creases. Ming painters like Wen Zhengming covered folding fans with landscapes and verse. In Korea, Jeong Seon and Kim Hong-do produced celebrated albums, and in Japan the workshop of Tawaraya Sōtatsu was known for painted fans, some later pasted onto screens.