How China’s Bayeux Tapestry differs from ours

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive of the English/French embroidered cloth couldn’t be further from the refined intervals and sophisticated relationships of the Chinese scroll, and yet both tell much about the cultures that produced them. However, neither should be read simply as historical documents: both offer rare aesthetic pleasures of quite different distillations. The Chinese elixir seems to me to be particularly effective in landscape painting.

The exhibition is in two halves, subdivided into six successive periods, with the works arranged both chronologically and thematically. The dim lighting conjures a reverential atmosphere suiting the Buddhist devotional images which next appear, though some exhibits are difficult to see in the conservational gloom.