Along the Thames: Sketching London Through the Lens of Along the River During the Qingming Festival

Harbour Scroll: The Trinity Panorama is a shared act of looking, remembering, and imagining—an artistic experiment that reaches across cultures and eras. Initiated by artist Zorg Yifan Jing, the project invites the public to take part in a collective creative process: drawing on the long-scroll tradition of Along the River During the Qingming Festival to reweave the riverfront life of London’s Trinity Wharf into a contemporary handscroll. From the bustle of its Victorian docks to the present-day hum of its artistic community, from echoes of old shipyards to glimpses of modern glass towers, the scroll gathers not only scenery but the wider spectrum of riverbank life. Through the act of drawing, every participant becomes part of that vision—folded into the very landscape they depict.

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A Landscape Shaped by Memory

Trinity Wharf is a palimpsest of urban memory. Once the departure point for sailors, a transfer hub for goods, a site where dockworkers labored through day and night, and the first landing place for countless newcomers to London, it has transformed into a haven for artists, studios, and cultural institutions.
The lighthouse still keeps its quiet watch. The warehouses still hold the textures of tides and salt. The slow movement of boats along the Thames blends past and present into a single shifting frame. The site feels naturally aligned with the form of the handscroll: each inch of landscape a slice of time, each flicker of light carrying traces of labor, dust, longing, or arrival.

Drawing as an Accumulated Gesture

Participants in the workshop do not record the scene in a photographic or documentary way. Instead, they sketch in the fluid and accumulative spirit of ancient scroll-making—capturing the structure of the docks, the posture of the lighthouse, the interplay of stillness and motion along the riverbank, and the fleeting gestures of people passing through this moment.
Each person draws a different instant, yet the instants come together through their shared attention to Trinity Wharf, forming a ribbon of time. The handscroll never seeks a single perspective; it offers space for multiple viewpoints to coexist. London’s history, too, is not linear but a constellation of migrations, labors, arrivals, departures, and returns.

Where Time Unfolds Sideways

As the sketches unfold and join one another, they do more than stitch images together. Through the logic of the scroll, eras begin to flow into one another: a Victorian cargo vessel may sit beside a modern loading crane; the silhouette of a long-ago dockworker may stand next to the gesture of a contemporary artist moving supplies; a child walking the riverbank today may meet the gaze of a boy from a century past waiting on the tide.
Time stops stacking vertically. Instead, it unrolls laterally—rearranged, expanded, made porous. The riverfront becomes a kind of readable history, and each participant’s mark folds them gently into this cross-century narrative. They become figures within the scene, part of the riverbank, a page of London itself.

A Collective Way of Making Culture

For this reason, Harbour Scroll is far more than an exploration of drawing technique. It becomes a way of making culture through participation—a chance for people to rediscover the city by co-creating its imagery, to sense how they move with it, are shaped by it, and belong to it.
In a time when urban life grows increasingly fragmented and accelerated, such shared acts carry a quiet but meaningful resonance: they bring strangers together, give each person a place on the page, and remind us of our entanglement with each other and with the spaces we inhabit.

A Handscroll Between Past and Present

Ultimately, Harbour Scroll: The Trinity Panorama unfolds as a handscroll both ancient and new—borrowing the spatial intelligence of Along the River During the Qingming Festival while grounding itself in the textures of London’s riverfront.
Presented in a traditional Chinese silk-mounted format reminiscent of the original, the handscroll will be on view at Hackney Gallery from December 15–16, 2025,  inviting visitors to encounter the work in its full, unrolled form.

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