Considering Zhang Yanzi’s practice is deeply rooted in Chinese artistic traditions, showing her ink paintings and installations at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums in Edinburgh—a product of the Scottish Enlightenment—could have resulted in her works being overwhelmed or skewed by the potentially mismatched context. This pitfall, however, was deftly avoided. The juxtapositions between Zhang’s work and the Museum’s displays proved instead to be productive in their frictions. 

Zhang’s Qi (2012), a 60-meter ink scroll depicting the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2013, zigzagged above the Museum’s main gallery, which houses a collection of pathology specimens as well as surgical and dental instruments. Because of its dominating scale, Zhang’s installation was visible in its own right, but there were also more subtle interactions between the work and its setting. In the work’s lines of calligraphy, Zhang equates the Canal and its facilitation of mobility—and subsequently the growth of China’s trade and social networks—with the meridian channels of the body, described in Chinese medicine as the pathways through which qi, or energy, flows. Drawing on the fundamental tenet of traditional ink painting, where the goal is to capture not just the likeness of a scene but the essence of the depicted subjects, Zhang’s landscape exemplifies a holistic system for observing the world that is in stark contrast to the empirical taxonomy and clinical detachment of the anatomical displays that sat beneath Qi. This disparity gave a twist to the Museum’s superficial allusions to the shared interest between China and colonial British powers in the wellbeing of their general populaces, expressed throughout the exhibition’s texts.