Detail: This show comprising a major loan exhibition of thirty-eight figure paintings from the Shanghai Museum comprising scroll and album paintings from Ming, Qing and early Republican period explores how stories and tales from folklore, religious lore and literary culture were translated into pictorial images in paintings across six centuries in China. The exhibition is presented through four sometimes overlapping, sometimes interweaving themes, namely ‘crossings’ - stories about exiles, loyalists and rustics; the supernatural world of popular religion; models and exemplars in history; and finally, emperor-concubine and scholar-beauty romances. There are artworks which illustrate texts inscribed on or beside the paintings themselves. In other cases, the stories illustrated are part of oral history, so that the paintings served as visual props for the viewer to retell popular tales. Collectively, these artworks give a taste of China’s rich mythology and lyric tradition, and show how successive generations of artists gave new life to learning, belief and leisure in pictorial images fit for their own times.