November 2, 2012

Chinese Families Together Project

On the run-up to the opening of The Search for Immortality the Fitzwilliam’s education team worked with local Chinese families to get their take on the show.  The group Chinese Families Together created a booklet for members of the public of 16 highlight objects in the exhibition, featuring descriptive riddles created by their children.

Chinse Families Together

Chinse Families Together

Below Jeremy Yuan, age 8, has contributed a blog post about the project and his riddle.

In January my parents told me there was going to be a Fitzwilliam project about Han China. They asked me if I wanted to be involved and I agreed. I knew this was a chance to get popular. In early March my mum received 24 pictures of Chinese objects, we were meant to choose one.

I wanted to do the toilet but it was too hard to describe so I chose a Chinese emperor’s seal (not the animal seal).

We were invited to the Fitzwilliam Museum on Saturday 17th March 2012 to write our riddles.

At first we went into a fan room to have a practise creating a riddle and comparing a butterfly (not real, a model) with a fan. Next we went into Chinese gallery and we saw a Chinese model of a black elephant and thought about if we were it how would we feel and we described it. Then we went upstairs to the 1st floor and went into a gallery where beautiful paintings were on the wall.

We were given a pencil, an A4 sheet of paper, and a clipboard. We were given the photograph of the object we chose and we wrote a riddle about it. We were very careful that we did not include the name of the artefact.

I did an impressive riddle of 140 words. Like the many other children who wrote a riddle, I’m very proud of my work and I hope there will be another exhibition like this. 

Jeremy’s ‘What am I?’ riddle:

I need ink to produce work,
I give whoever uses me the power of an emperor,
I have writing at the bottom of me,
I have a beautiful golden dragon knob on the top of me,
I long to get up and stretch my body for I am in a really annoying position,
I always want to get up and fly away but I am imprisoned forever and I am getting quite lonely,
I am old and battered but the gold that surrounds me always reminds me of the golden era that I was in.

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