The spectacular digital display marries the genius of a Song Dynasty artist with the ingenuity of a team of young Chinese artists from Crystal Digital. Photos Provided to China Daily

The digital Qingming Shanghe Tu is both a visual and emotional draw for its overseas audience.

It was the main attraction at the China Pavilion during Shanghai World Expo 2010 and it was recently exhibited in Singapore, where it drew record crowds. Judith Huang files this report.

Heraclitus said: "You can never step in the same river twice, for both you and the river would have changed." The Greek philosopher may have felt it was an impossible task, but he did not reckon with the creativity and ingenuity of Chinese artists one thousand years apart. The re-creation of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) Qingming Shanghe Tu, or The River at the Festival of Pure Brightness, is an animated scroll of epic proportions, standing 110 meters in length and 6 meters in height. Enormously ambitious, it took two years and 2,000 people to create, resulting in 1,068 characters that move in a four-minute loop, depicting a city as it transits from day to night.

This rendition of Zhang Zeduan's masterpiece deliberately links the China of today to the China of a previous golden age, the Northern Song.

Not only is the epic nature of the work evident in its scale and the sheer effort expanded.

A Moving Masterpiece: The Song Dynasty As Living Art is also technologically ambitious, encompassing both time and space, employing both sight and sound, and even extending into the third dimension by engaging the viewer through an interactive river of light which flows alongside the scroll.

It is a spectacular fusion of ancient art and modern technology, and a new immersion experience.

Whereas previous iterations of Qingming Shanghe Tu have been admiring copies of the work, this recreation is a more perfect fulfillment of the original, bringing it to new heights.

The original painting depicted a utopian cityscape that scholars have failed to pinpoint on any map - this painting was meant to represent a timeless city based on Bian Jing but is, in fact, an ideal city.

The artists at Crystal Digital Technology have gone one step further and included the fourth dimension of time.

Originally, they even intended for the animation to loop through the four seasons in order to present a timeless cycle.

It is in times of surging national confidence and prosperity that epic works are commissioned and produced.

Epic has always been a genre tied to nationhood.

The national epic of Rome, the Aeneid, was commissioned to celebrate the golden age of the Roman Empire under the reign of Caesar Augustus.

Monumental epics necessarily require the prosperity, infrastructure and patronage system of a confident power to produce, and this often means they are commissioned by a sovereign or nation.

Their appearance usually marks a cultural and economic renaissance, heralding a new golden age.

The Aeneid traces the trials and tribulations of the founding father of Rome, Aeneas; the new Qingming Shanghe Tu harks back to an earlier golden age of China.

But while the epic of Augustan Rome traces the journey of a single man, Qingming Shanghe Tu is a comprehensive picture of society in Bian Jing, then the capital of the Song Dynasty, offering a fascinating cross-section of society.

The focus on the city is significant, as are the ideas behind the re-creation.

How can a modern city achieve its ideals? The re-creation of Bian Jing is a place where city and country are in harmony, the languid village co-existing on the right side of the scroll with the booming city on the left.

Nature and urban life are inextricably linked through the carrying of coals by donkeys.

Conflicts - such as the boat nearly crashing into the Rainbow Bridge - are resolved by everyone pitching in.

Technology and innovation are embraced - the Song Dynasty saw the invention of movable type, the compass, gunpowder, paper money, night markets, restaurants and professional storytelling, as well as a bloom of high art and culture - all this in an architecturally advanced, well-governed, orderly and prosperous state.

The ideal city is characterized by orderly and harmonious flow, just like the river the painting is named for - with an entrepreneurial and upward-moving spirit, scientific and cultural advancement, harmony between the diverse occupations, religions and nationalities, and openness to international trade and ideas.

This is found not just in the animation itself, but also in the process of the re-creation.

A diverse group of Chinese artists came together to cooperate on A Moving Masterpiece: The Song Dynasty As Living Art.

The team infused new life through a technology first pre-figured in Egyptian wall drawings, then perfected in America first with the rotoscope, and then brought to its artistic height and commercial success in the studios of Walt Disney.

Unlike Augustan Rome, the Song Dynasty that inspired Qingming Shanghe Tu exerted a different kind of power. Rather than relying on military force and conquest, the Song Dynasty exercised a kind of far-reaching soft power.

Its entrepreneurs and scholars invented technologies still in use today, technologies that enabled widespread education, encouraged trade and travel, inspired artistic excellence and not only tolerated but encouraged diversity and openness.

Can China step in the same river twice?

Can it produce a city like Zhang's, or Crystal Digital's Bian Jing? If this is truly the epic of the age, then we can hold high hopes for it.

This digital marvel has already traveled to Hong Kong, Macao and Taipei where it has been viewed by over 10 million people.

Singapore was its first destination outside China, and the exhibition now returns home, where it will make a tour of all the major cities later this year.

Contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 03/11/2012 page6)