Most books make a simple deal with you: turn one page, then the next. Dragon-scale binding does something more surprising. Sheets are arranged so they can overlap and unfold, producing an object that changes as you handle it. Even the name makes you want to see one move.
Shanghai’s Jing’an theatre-season guide listed an exhibition on Zhang Xiaodong’s dragon-scale binding and contemporary practice in 2026. That last phrase matters. The point was not simply to place an old technique behind glass, but to see what a present-day artist can do with it.
Four and a half years for one unfolding novel
Zhang’s version of A Dream of Red Mansions makes the scale of the work clear. The Shanghai report describes eight volumes covering the novel’s 120 chapters, with 230 illustrations. Unfolded, the work extends to more than sixty metres. Zhang spent four and a half years making it, using materials including paper, cloth and wood.
Those figures tell you why this is more than a decorative cover. The maker has to think about how a very long object closes, how its parts move and what somebody can see at each stage. An illustration may have to work as a fragment near one page edge and as part of a larger view when the structure opens.
His Dunhuang-inspired works take the experiment in another direction. The report connects Qianye Dunhuang I and II with the murals he studied after visiting Dunhuang in 2020. For a work titled Non Sand, he used dye made from chestnut shells that had soaked for more than two years. The colour was part of his response to sunset around Mingsha Mountain.
That is an artist making choices about a particular place and material. It is not a claim that historic Dunhuang books were dyed in this way. The old binding becomes a starting point for new works whose pictures, colours and structure have been planned together.
One picture across many edges
An earlier city report describes the construction more closely. Pages are attached along a scroll at carefully spaced intervals. Strips from an illustration sit at the page margins, so spreading the object can bring those separate pieces together into a complete image.
That means the page edge isn’t merely the end of a sheet. It helps carry part of another view. Turning or spreading the pages changes which pieces can be seen together, making movement part of the artwork.
The dragon-scale comparison comes from the overlapping arrangement. It isn’t a promise that the book is about dragons. Form and content can belong to different ideas, just as a book with a spine needn’t tell a story about a skeleton.
Spacing becomes important because the pieces have to relate to one another. A maker is planning for several states of the same object: closed, partly opened and spread out. A design that works in one position may hide something in another.
Zhang has also explored forms beyond the scroll. The 2022 report describes a version of A Dream of Red Mansions with pages attached to thin cardboard that folds like an accordion. That is a different structure, but it keeps the interest in what an unfolding object can reveal.
These examples help explain contemporary practice. The artist isn’t only copying a historical appearance. He is choosing structures that let paper behave in particular ways and considering what readers can discover through handling them.
A screen can show an image changing, but a paper object also gives you edges, weight and a movement made by your own hands. The two aren’t rivals that require a winner. They offer different possibilities. In this book, the next view may begin with the way you hold the page.
A book you have to think with your hands
Try to imagine designing a story for pages that do not behave like your school exercise book. Which image appears first? What is hidden underneath? Does opening the object change the order in which somebody reads it? Those are questions for a maker as much as a reader.
The exhibition guide describes a heritage craft and a contemporary interpretation. It does not mean every Chinese book was once bound this way, or that a clever fold alone makes a good story. Materials, patience and choices about what to show all count.
If you made a dragon-scale book, what would it contain: a map, a comic, a family recipe or something nobody should see until the final layer opens? The format suggests that the way a story is held can be part of the story itself.
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Sources
- Shanghai Municipal Government: A culture lover’s guide to Jing’an during the theater season
- Shanghai Municipal Government: Artist Zhang Xiaodong explains dragon-scale binding, 12 March 2022