A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China

The “A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China” is impressive

documentary for how to look different kind of images. David Hockney presented

two scrolls from China and Canaletto. He said that none of the two kinds of images

coming from different geographies are not more advanced than the others.

Some people think that non-perspective pictures are considered

underdeveloped, but David Hockney does not agree with this argument. Scrolls are

flexibility images because there are no edges, so you can move and control to look

different part of the scroll like a camera. If you move the edges, it will be like a

movie, but only the figures will not move. The first scroll was painted by more

conventional technic. The scroll tells the story of a journey taken by Emperor of

China in 1689 along the Grand Canal from Wuxi to Suzhou. In this scroll, we could

not see any deep, so there is not perspective. For this, lines are always parallel and

we could see every human figure are same height, but contrary to common

knowledge, human figures and attitude are different from each other and all of

them are special in these scrolls. There are a lot of details. Seeing everything on

Chinese people's daily life on the Grand Canal means that it was drawn from the

God view. Another thing about the view of God is that we can see in this picture

the interior of people, what they do at home, where people are.

When another scroll is examined 75 years after the first scroll, we can observe

the change. In the second scroll, the human figures at the bottom of the scroll are

larger than the at the top of ones, so this shows us that there is depth and the

depth gives us reality. The Chineses were influenced by the West in these 75 years

and they used perspective technic on their scrolls. Therefore, presenter said that
Chinese people protect their culture and techniques, but at the same time they

used perspective and this situation brings the picture closer to reality. The other

painting is Canaletto painting. Canaletto is like a photograph because this picture

is drawn in perspective and is visible to the human eye, so David Hockney likened

Canaletto with the second scroll.

To sum up, David Hockney explained about perspective and ways of seeing

clearly. He gave three example and elucidated pictures. In my opinion, perspective

is really an important aspect that gives reality to painting, but that doesn't mean

that pictures without perspective are undeveloped. I was impressed by the scrolls

that took years to produce and made you feel like you were in a film while

examining.