Page 320 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

mb unusual arrangement executed with great elegance;
each bird is composed of four volutes that curve
alternately in opposite directions. The remaining
decoration is composed of scrolls and diagonal
lines — traditional motifs in the repertoire of Chu
lacquer decoration from the fourth century BCE to
the third.
The second cup has an entirely abstract decora-
tion— unsymmetrical at first glance (and for that
reason unusual in pre-imperial China), but in fact
forming a composition similar to the bird-and-
quatrefoil motif of the other erbei. This example is
one of the earliest known objects to make use of
these design innovations, created at the very end
of the fourth century BCE and fully developed in the
third century. The range of the artists' skills dis-
played by these two cups is remarkable — spanning
figures taken from nature (albeit not naturalistic)
rendered with painstaking attention to detail, to
large and purely abstract designs. The red and black
volutes on the second erbei are rendered so that
they may be viewed as red ornaments on a black
background or, alternatively, black-on-red — an
ambiguous and apparently deliberate visual effect.
Whatever their meaning, such effects were clearly
valued by the artists and by their patrons. AT

1 Excavated in 1982 (17-1,17-2); published: Hubei 19853, 78,
figs. 64.1, 64.4; color pis. 29.1, 29.3, 29.4, and pi. 36.
2 Tomb i at Anju, Suizhou, Hubei province. See Suizhou
1982, 53.
3 The earliest known example was excavated from Tomb i at
Shazhong, Jiangling, in Hubei province. See Hubei 1996,
189, fig. 126.3.

319 I CHU L A C Q U E R S FROM H U B E I