The Great Nuo Exorcism (大傩图轴)

Most Song painting shows scholars and courtiers. This one shows people laughing behind masks, and it is a gift to anyone who wants to know how ordinary Song citizens played.

The hanging scroll is called The Great Nuo Exorcism. It depicts the nuo, the year end ritual of driving out pestilence and malevolent spirits. The figures wear masks, stagger, and mime the expulsion. They are comic, unglamorous, and completely uninterested in looking noble. This is popular performance caught by a court trained hand.

The nuo was ancient by the Song, a state ritual and a village one at once, performed at the turning of the year to clear the air before spring. Paintings of it are rare. This scroll is one of the few visual records we have of the ritual as lived noise rather than as official ceremony, the masks, the dance, the rough comedy of purification.

Scholars often link the hand to Su Hanchen, a Southern Song master of genre and children, but the safer reading is anonymous Southern Song. Either way the interest is the same. The painting values the festival enough to record it without polishing it.

A ritual meant to banish sickness survives here as pure entertainment, a thousand years old and still recognisably a party.

Image © The Palace Museum. View the original in the Palace Museum collection.