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Five Thousand Elegant Years of Art
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18635 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,726 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Raised on the Western visual vernacular, American museum goers are often intimidated by Chinese art. The mysteriously decorated Shang bronzes, preternaturally serene landscape paintings, and undecipherable calligraphy tend to be off-putting.
But television documentaries, the opening of China to tourism, and museum exhibitions of Chinese art in recent years have introduced many to the art and archeology of the nation boasting the longest continuing culture on earth. And what a wealth of objects, rich and strange, China has produced through the millennia.
Two of the best collections of Chinese art in this country are held by two Smithsonian Institution museums: the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Located side by side, they share the same curatorial staff but operate separately due to the arcane proscriptions under which the Freer was founded. The Sackler has mounted a well-selected exhibition that gleans 5,000 years of Chinese art. The more than two hundred exquisite pieces in The Arts of China, drawn primarily from the Sackler's permanent collection, range from Shang bronzes and jades, Buddhist objects and wall fragments, and traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy to a smattering of furnishings.
The earliest objects--the ancient bronzes and jades that date as far back as the Neolithic period--are often the most intriguing. This is partly because of their age, but also because of their remoteness from the present culture and their beauty. The Sackler collection is particularly strong in ancient works, and five of the eight display rooms are given over to this period, dating from the Neolithic period through the Han dynasty.
Found in burial sites, these objects retain their mystery even for experts. We do know that in life they were used in religious, state, and ancestral rituals and as personal accessories; in death, they reaffirmed the social and political status of the deceased.
The earlier jades date from the Neolithic period and the Shang dynasty, the first truly identifiable dynasty in Chinese culture. They begin as simple, flattened disks a few inches in diameter and as ritual blades, modeled after real knives, spearheads, and axes. Eventually, the surfaces became more elaborately decorated and the shapes more complex--an evolution true for the bronzes, as well.
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