Page 19 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

The growth of luxury was not an isolated development. Even at this early date it was

accompanied by a new attention to the domestic environment. One expression of this was the
shift in this period from lacquer to hardwood furniture. Hardwood offered the advantage of
flexibility. Being cheaper than lacquering, it lent itself more easily to experimentation; it was
also intrinsically better suited to carved decoration. Covered with the brightly covered
textiles that often accompanied furniture in the Ming, particularly on formal occasions, it

offered a strikingly different background. Alternatively, left plain, it invited close attention to
the grain of the wood or the carving and created the restrained effect familiar from modern
museum reconstructions of Chinese interiors (503). From its beginnings in Suzhou, the

fashion for hardwood was soon generalized throughout China.
A second type of object familiar to a Western audience can also be traced back to the
changes in Suzhou interiors in this period. Ceramics had been made in the characteristic
reddish stoneware of Yixing for centuries. By the sixteenth century, however, Yixing potters
had come to specialize in teapots, the best of which were luxury items, signed by master

artisans. This could not have happened without the upsurge of tea-drinking during the
sixteenth century, documented in countless paintings. Earlier in the Ming tea-drinking as a
self-conscious practice had been largely a solitary affair, associated with meditation and

other practices of self-cultivation. But now it consecrated an informal etiquette of visiting, in
which display and contemplation of the teapot had a role to play. The evidence of paintings
by Tang Yin, Wen Zhengming, Qiu Ying and others suggests that this was part of a larger
change. The inner, private spaces of the house were becoming more accessible than before to
visitors: the domestic realm was becoming, to some extent, public (504-05). This may help to

explain why so much of the art of display from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has an
intimate character, requiring close observation and contemplation.
Finally, the emergence of an entrepreneurial culture implied equally significant

changes at a lower level of urban society. As cities expanded and prosperity continued, a
thriving popular culture developed. Its material forms are easily overlooked today because so
many of them -- festival decorations, shrines, toys, lanterns, shop signs -- were ephemeral.
One of its few surviving traces is ceramics from a vastly expanded Jingdezhen and other
southern kilns. These we know well today only because so many were exported from the

mid-sixteenth century onwards. In their new foreign homes in South and South-East Asia, the
Near East, Africa and Europe, even ordinary items of Chinese crockery were rare, exotic
items, and were often carefully preserved (505). Although these porcelains are usually

termed export wares, they made so few aesthetic concessions to their intended markets that in
most cases they can equally well represent urban popular taste in China. The decoration
bursts with life, the desire for worldly success endlessly reaffirmed in auspicious symbols.