Museum's exhibition is steady as a steed

The Shanghai Museum launched the exhibition Galloping into Spring: A Celebration of the Year of the Horse at its People's Square location on Feb 4, featuring 16 horse-themed cultural relics spanning nearly a millennium.

The museum has held annual events featuring the Chinese zodiac for eight years during the Spring Festival holiday. With selected artifacts from its collection, alongside loaned pieces from counterparts across China, these exhibitions are a popular part of many museumgoers' Chinese New Year celebrations.

The horse, a symbolic animal in the Chinese zodiac, has been both a vital companion to humans and a spiritual emblem woven into the fabric of Chinese civilization, Chu Xiaobo, director of the Shanghai Museum, says in the exhibition's preface. "It served in farming and warfare, enabled postal and transport services, and embodied ceremonial grandeur and auspiciousness.

"We hope visitors find inspiration from these steeds in the spring breeze, behold the noble images of horses across the ages, and hear the resounding hoofbeats of history," he says.

The Chinese zodiac-themed exhibitions give the Shanghai Museum the opportunity to select from its collection some of its rarely shown objects, and present them to the public with new interpretations, Chu Xin, head of the museum's exhibition department, said at the exhibition opening. This year, the exhibition also features a young curatorial team and innovative scenography design.

The Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, a series of rubbings from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) that have been stored in the Shanghai Museum's library for decades, are debuting in the exhibition.

The rubbings represent the great achievements of stone art during the Tang Dynasty, Chu Xin says.

The original series consists of six large limestone relief sculptures depicting the war horses of Emperor Taizong (599-649). Each steed, celebrated in poems written by the emperor, bears battle scars, commemorating its service in founding the Tang Dynasty.

While four of the reliefs are now kept at the Beilin (Stele Forest) Museum in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, two were smuggled and sold to the United States in the early 1900s and are exhibited at the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.