Knapton Rasti Asian Art are pleased to offer a catalogue of Chinese works of art, the fourth in the company's history. This year's exhibition covers a broad area in terms of time and material, and has been selected from the same eclectic mixture of sources around the world.

Coincidentally we have two rare objects from the reign of the Yongle Emperor 1403-24, so perhaps the painting No.43 and the stembowl No.42 is a good starting point for the introduction. The founder of the Ming dynasty, who had reigned under the nianhao Hongwu, died in A.D. 1398. The Emperor's grandson succeeded to the throne, age 16, but his uncle, the Prince of Yan rebelled, leading to three years of civil war, which ended when the Prince seized and burned the Imperial Palace in Nanjing. The Prince then declared himself Emperor under the reign title Yongle. It seems unlikely that he would have run an Imperial atelier, particularly so soon after a damaging internal war. Thus, our painting was most probably painted behind the walls of a monastery. The Ming Emperors made much of their devout Buddhism, so it is not unlikely that the monastery would have benefited from Imperial patronage. The second piece is a tianbai stem bowl covered in a white monochrome glaze or "sweet white" as it was known. There are a number of published examples of anhua decorated Yongle stembowls, with or without marks. The undecorated ones are certainly harder to find, but they do exist as mentioned by Geng Baochang, Ming Qing Ciqi Jianding, Forbidden City Press, 1993, p.36. Evidence from excavation at Jingdezhen indicates that stembowls without decoration were produced, cf. Imperial Porcelains of the Yongle and Xuande Periods excavated from the site of the Ming Imperial Factory at Jingdezhen, Hong Kong, 1989, p.84. In an exhibition at the Shanghai Museum, entitled Treasures from Snow Mountains there are two stembowls with fitted cases. One is a Xuande blue and white example with a simple woven case (much like the one that envelopes the Chenghua stembowl, example No.41, the other a white jade cup with a more elaborate gilt bronze casing inset with turquoise. They are both from the Tibet Museum and our rare example fits into this category of Chinese works of art made for the Tibetan religious hierarchy. Regina Krahl notes in an Orientations article (December 1989) that the Yongle Emperor cultivated good relations with the principal Tibetan religious leaders, sending presents to Tibet and exchanging gifts on several occasions with the fifth hierarch Halima, who in 1407 held a religious service for Yongle's deceased parents in Nanjing.

Brushes, ink, paper and inkstone are the cornerstone of the scholars' studio. They have relied on these as their principal tools, whether writing or painting. The era spanning the beginning of the Kangxi era 1662 to the end of the Qianlong 1796, saw the quality and production of inkstones receive much attention, causing the stone for inkstones, and in particular the production of Duan stone, and refined clay, to undergo increasing development, No.17, the jade inkbox in the form of a pebble-shaped Duan stone, is a refined work of art, that like so much of the art from this period 1662-1722 alludes to previous eras of Chinese history. The thinness of the stone, the high polish, and the easy curves of the pebble form give the object a pleasingly aesthetic feel, and enforce our belief that this was an important object on a scholar's desk, as a utilitarian work of art and because of its shape, a reference to the importance of inkstones to the literati. As with previous catalogues, there are a number of jades, and we should mention the figure No.19 that belonged to an important Tianjin family and was made by Imperial command. It is an interesting product of the flow of ideas that had been coming north from India for a number of centuries. Although the deity represented is the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, there are undercurrents of Hindu decoration and iconography from earlier periods. The headdress and body jewellery hint at the post-Chola Vijayanagar bronzes from South India which were executed in the 14th-15th centuries, with their lissome, yet ample, figures, sinuous jewellery and form-hugging folds. If we move back another century to the dry lacquer sculptures of the Song period in China, there was a Bodhisattva in the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition of 1970, entitled The Mount Trust Collection of Chinese Art (No. 69) which has a similar pose and is clad in the garb of an Indian prince. As with our jade figure, the natural pose and unemphatic, flowing lines contribute much to its air of intimate presence.

The catalogue contains a number of lacquer pieces, including a pair of early foliate dishes and several Ming objects. Early Song lacquer was mainly monochrome and took its shapes from contemporary gold and silver ware, that in its turn had developed directly out of Tang production. There was an increasing tendency during the Song period to decorate monochromes with gilding, which in most cases, as here, gave rubbed away. The core of our dishes No.20 is a combination of the familiar coiled wood technique and interwoven cord. We are fortunate to have such a cross section of pieces from late fifteenth century to the Wanli reign 1573-1619. One of the main types of official lacquers during the period either side of 1500 was carved polychrome ware, apparent also in the porcelain enamels of the time. No.22 is an example of the careful juxtaposition of the colours, raised above a ground, often seen in containers (the tiered boxes were probably for incense) of this period, and the rounding off of any hard edges left by the knife, leaving a well polished patina helped naturally by age, but initiated by the carvers skill. No.27 a later Ming box and cover (Watt, in East Asian Lacquer, The Irving Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p.102, suggests this type of box may have been made as gifts for lower orders of the nobility), shows a propensity for using space in the scene, with scholars scattered over a wide area of rocks and trees, the artist less prepared to accept the enclosed scenes of the small seal containers of a hundred years before, and perhaps acting as a precursor to the free flowing Transitional wares a few decades hence. Chinese lacquer offers an infinite variety of artistic techniques and styles, and this small group shows some of these possibilities.

The stone sculpture of the young boy standing No.28 presented us with many questions. The simplicity and subtlety of the carving point immediately to the Song period, probably the eleventh century. The individualised features and the feel for the human body put this work of art in the style of ateliers influenced by the Tang but imposing their own cultural identity. The Dazu rock carvings are an example of this cross-fertilisation of ideas, both religious and secular. Lying between the cities of Chongqing and Chengdu, the grottos were begun in the eighth century and continued into the Southern Song period 1127-1279, when Sizchuan province was particularly prosperous, with official records showing that between 1175-1223 the area had to supply a third of the grain for the military nationally, and it was of course the centre of a communications network that stretched west down the Silk Road, south through to Burma and India, and north to the central plain of China.Amongst the Dazu carvings are scenes of domestic and rural life, herdsmen looking after buffalos, a drunken father and his son in an interior, that merge into the more formalised Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian imagery. Our boy fits into the more naturalistic settings, with his art of innocence and tranquillity, the lack of ostentation, any form of decoration to the clothing and the unaffected way his hair is cut, point to an origin similar to these scenes. The remains of a red pigment to the belt suggest the only attempt of the sculptor to take the eye of the viewer away from the gently turned head and well executed folds in his tunic. The sole hint of any form of indulgence is the appearance of the clasp on his belt, in the form of a cicada. This insect used to symbolise immortality and one made of jade No.1 was laid in the mouth of the deceased. A connection to the afterlife is a possibility.Another more tenuous link is to one of the goddess Guanyin's acolytes. In his pre-eminent book on blanc-de-chine, Donnelly notes the two attendants that can sometimes be found with her, namely Shan-ts'ai (Golden Youth) and Lung-nu (Jade Maiden). It is the former that interests us. Sadly, the arms have gone from the sculpture, but we can surmise from the positions of the upper arms and the folds in the tunic, that he may have held the head of an object or plant, such as a lotus stem, in the right hand, which is higher, and its end in the left. In summary, we can see that just prior to the tenth century artists had started to use real people as models and under the Song, the link between religion and Buddhist images was even further broken, until it became fully secularised.

We would like to thank Alan Tabor for his photography, and Anthony Evans for his translation work, particularly the calligraphic tile No.37.

Christopher Knapton
Nader Rasti
November 2004