Page 16 - FIsh Bowl Xuande Period, April 2017 Sotheby's

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FISHES IN THE IMPERIAL POND
REGINA KRAHL
The deep sh pond on this dazzling bowl exudes an irresistible
warm sentiment that instantly touches the heart. The bowl
is unrivalled in its design, its painting quality, shape and size, The ‘Pleasures of Fishes’ thus became a byword for freedom
and only two comparable smaller pieces appear to exist, both
in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Although the sh
pond design has been frequently used as a motif on Chinese
porcelain, it is hardly ever infused with as much life as on the
present bowl, whose shape cleverly evokes the illusion of
gentle underwater motion.
Fish paintings were a recognized, if not widespread, genre
of Chinese ink painting since the Song dynasty (960-1279),
perhaps made popular through Liu Cai, a court painter of
the late Northern Song (960-1127) specialized in paintings of
shes. The most famous painting attributed to him is the two-
and-a-half-meter long handscroll Fish Swimming amid Falling
Flowers today in the St. Louis Art Museum (97:1926.). The
representation of shes and their movements was perceived
as a task yet more challenging than the depiction of other
animals and birds, because their habitat impedes observation,
and the resulting naturalism is awesome for painters not
working directly from nature.
The topos of shes swimming in a pond was in China
inextricably associated with one of the most famous passages
of the book Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou (c. 369-c. 286 BC),
Daoism’s foremost thinker, where sh feature frequently
in allegories. In this passage the free-thinking spirit of
Zhuangzi, who comments on the pleasures of shes darting
around where they please, is opposed by the methodological
reasoning of the Confucian Huizi, who challenges the Daoist’s
legitimacy to talk about the feelings of shes, not being a sh
himself. After some exchanges, the Daoist eventually wins the
14 SOTHEBY’S 㬴ჹ℁
argument by refusing to submit to his opponent’s formal logic.
from restraints, one of the perennial ideals of China’s literati,
which represented either unachievable dream, for the
members of the bureaucracy, or perceived reality, for those
who had withdrawn from it. Daoist thought ourished in the
early Ming period (1368-1644), although the Xuande Emperor
(r. 1426-35) did not propagate himself as a particularly
fervent proponent of Daoism. Among the imperial princes,
however, patronage of Daoist causes was strong enough to
provoke several memorials to be handed in to the court, which
requested a ban on the furthering of new Daoist monasteries
(Richard G. Wang, The Ming Prince and Daoism. Institutional
Patronage of an Elite, Oxford, 2012).
Even without the philosophical signi cance of this motif
in mind, the serene state of the four fat shes oating
through water plants, seemingly at total ease within their
surroundings, is palpable when immersing oneself in this
pond, which emanates an air of peace and contentment.
Grouped in two pairs, the shes depict a carp and a mandarin
sh, or Chinese perch, each confronted with a type of bream,
fangyu, characterized by the bumpy forehead often developed
by older shes. While the former two are well known from
Chinese porcelain designs, the latter, although, like the other
two species, part of China’s staple diet for centuries, are
rarely depicted on porcelain. The shes are alternating with
three large and two small clumps of lotus with fully opened
blooms, buds, pods and large leaves in di erent stages of
development, interspersed with long undulating fronds of
pond weeds, clumps of clover fern and some fallen owers.
The latter may be meant to evoke the enchanting topic of Liu