Page 33 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

varying periods of creativity and stagnation are
averaged into a neat and continuous timeline, all of
which contributes to the popular image of China
as a monolithic country, fixed in its boundaries and
evolving only slowly over time.
This exhibition seeks to deconstruct that invariant
image, to demonstrate artistic diversity rather than
unity and to identify periods of heightened activity
and creativity in the arts. These pieces, which will
delight their audience by aesthetic merit, were
carefully chosen to emphasize the themes of
innovation and transformation: the conceptual
innovations that led artists to shift focus from the
supernatural to the human world, then to the
natural world, and thereafter to adopt elements
from all these worlds as vehicles of self-expression;
and the technological inventions and discoveries
that occurred as artists sought the most appropriate
medium in which to give form to their
conceptions.
I.
Early Chinese art manifests in form and decoration
a fascinating world of imaginary beasts, demons,
chimeras, and grotesques. These may have
originated in real creatures, whose forms were then
abstracted, commingled, and otherwise transformed
into complex animal images. These images are not
merely decorative; the major elements must have
embodied meanings, whether as totems, clan
insignia, or other consequential signifiers.This early,
animistic art is essentially static; the designs
covering the bronze ritual vessels imply no
potential for movement.
By the end of the Zhou dynasty several striking
innovations are apparent, foremost among them the
appearance of the human world and of potential
movement. Recognizable animals are placed in
comparatively realistic environments. The animals
and landscape are still not interconnected as a
scene, but the animals now appear capable ot switt
and light movement while wind is suggested in the
—mountains what had been bound and static before
Onis freed. lacquers and incised bronze tubes of
the late Zhou-Han period even the mountain
peaks, cliffs, foliage, and "cloud patterns" pulsate
Wewith life. see here the first signs of an interest in
representing real landscape in the arts.
The Qin-Han era, however, is predominantly the
world of humankind. Beginning with the lite-size
and startlingly lifelike Qin military figures, human
scale and a human point of view come to dominate
much subsequent art. Given the epochal
importance of this shift, it seems appropriate that
the English name "China" derives from the name
of the first of the imperial dynasties, the Qin. And
just as the frontiers of the empire .ire gradually
extended, and border regions pacified, so too is
nature tamed and contained in urban hunting
parks, which figure significantly in the poetry of
the period as well as in the art. Animals continue to
be important but now within a context defined bv
purely human concerns.
Among these human concerns are ideas about
religion, expressed in Buddhist and Daoist thought
and imagery that comes to dominate art in the Six
Dynasties-Tang era. As the foreign styles associated
with Buddhism are gradually assimilated and
Sinihed, the human figure continues to dominate
its pictorial environment. The fantastical creatures
of the past survive as decorative forms rather than
as embodiments of awesome powers. At the same
time a growing interest in landscape for its own
sake becomes apparent alongside the dominant
figural tradition.
The landscape art created by the Chinese during
the late Tang-Five Dynasties-Song period is one of
the great glories of human achievement. Its
technical evolution can be traced from the linearitv
of early incised, inlaid, and painted designs to the
more complex spatial representations of the later
Tang era; conceptually it is the final stage and
beneficiary of the supernatural- and human-
centered worlds described above. In this aesthetic
culmination, which occurred in China centuries
earlier than elsewhere in the world, natural forces
which had earlier been describable only as
delimited and isolated forms, are fully encompassed
by the human mind and described in integrated
landscapes that are monumental in scale and
freighted with symbolic meanings.
II.
Another way of approaching the art and culture of
early China is by considering the continuous series
of technical innovations occurring in the various
mediums used by early artists. It was William
Willetts, in his Chinese Art of [958, who first
brought to bear the findings of Joseph Needham's
Science and Civilization in China in his brilliant stud)
of Chinese art. Willetts 's focus on technology
created .1 particularly useful framework for the
study of such "decorative" or "useful" or "minor"
arts as jades, bronzes, lacquers, textiles, and ceramics
,is well as sculpture and painting.
Worked jades fust appear in the Liangzhu and
I [ongshan Neolithic cultures, demonstrating at that
early period already advanced techniques for
shaping this most recalcitrant material. I he lorms
—and designs of the earliest jades the pig-dragons
—and in.isks doubtless held potent meanings foi
theii contemporaries, notwithstanding our inability
to interpret them. Eventually these formal and
hieratic patterns give wa) 10 ever more intricate