Page 40 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

sacrificial victim) with his hands tied behind his back. A few of the
larger pieces have slots in the back, suggesting that they might
have been part of the structure and decoration of a building, per-
haps a sacrificial hall; for there is a close similarity in style between
many of these figures and those depicted on the ritual bronzes.
They are carved foursquare out of the block, rigidly frontal, and
have something of the formality and compactness of Egyptian
art. Their impressiveness (although none is more than a metre or
so in maximum dimension) derives from their solid, monumental
feeling of weight and from the engraved geometric and zoo-
morphic designs which play over their surface, rather than from
the tension over the skin itself which enlivens Egyptian sculpture.
SHANG POTTERY Ceramics formed the backbone of early Chinese art, indispensa-
ble, ubiquitous, reflecting the needs and tastes of the highest and
the lowest, lending its forms and decoration to the metalworker
and, less often, borrowing from him. In the Shang, the crudest is
a grey earthenware, cord-marked, incised or decorated with re-
peated stamped motifs ranging from squares and coils—the ances-
tor of the thunder pattern (lei-wen)—to simple versions of the
zoomorphic masks that appear on the bronzes. Pottery decorated
by stamping or carving geometric designs in the wet clay has been
found in a number of Neolithic sites in the southeast, notably in
Fukicn (Kuang-tse) and Kwangsi (Ch'ing-chiang). In South
China, this technique persisted into the Han Dynasty and was car-
ried thence to Southeast Asia—if, indeed, it had not originated
there. It is very seldom found in the Neolithic pottery of North
China, and its appearance on vessels at Chcngchow and Anyang
suggests that by the Shang Dynasty the culture of the southern
peoples was already beginning to make its influence felt.
The beautiful white Shang pottery is unique in the history of
Chinese ceramics. So fine is it that it has been taken for porcelain,
but it is in fact a very brittle ware made from almost pure kaolin,
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finished on the wheel, and fired at about 1000 C. Many writers
have remarked how closely its decoration echoes that of the
bronzes, but there is no proof that this style in fact originated in
bronze. As we have seen, southeastern China had already evolved
a technique for stamping designs in the wet clay, which in turn in-
19 Um. Carved white pottery. From
fluenced bronze design; the white stoneware urn in the Freer Gal-
Anyang Lite Shang Dynasty.
lery illustrated here is indeed very close in design and decoration
to a bronze vessel in the Hellstrom collection. The Chcngchow
finds suggest that some of the motifs decorating both the white
ware and the bronzes originated in the earlier stamped grey pot-
tery; the techniques and designs used in woodcarving suggest an-
other possible source. Some of the grey and buff ware found in
Shang sites in Honan and Hupeh is glazed. While in some cases the
glaze was produced accidentally when wood ash fell on the heated
pottery in the kiln, in others it was a deliberately applied ash glaze.
These Shang glazed wares, which are now being found over a
wide area of northern, central and eastern China, mark the begin-
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lal