Page 56 - Important Chinese Art Hong Kong Sotheby's April 2017

A XUANDE MASTERPIECE
REGINA KRAHL
The mastery of copper-red glaze designs, such as the three
fishes on this stem cup was one of the special achievements
of the imperial potters of the Xuande reign (1426-35) and
was not repeated to this standard in any other period. The
radical simplicity of this three-fish and related three-fruit
designs is without par in the history of Chinese porcelain
decoration and exceptional among Chinese imperial works of
art. As a porcelain design, it was dictated largely by technical brought to the highest standard in the Yongle reign and often
considerations, as the potters aimed at achieving the deepest,
most intense red available with copper pigment. As an artistic
concept, however, it was not totally without precedent in
Chinese art and would not have caught the Xuande Emperor
completely unawares.
Unassuming though it seems, its stark simplicity has been
enlivened by a simple yet highly efficient trick: by letting one red glaze for painting with the brush, for which it is believed
fish swim in the opposite direction from the other two, three
different pairs of fish appear on the cup: a pair swimming
towards each other, a pair pursuing each other, and a pair
swimming away from each other, thus effortlessly achieving
variation and avoiding repetition. To create the utmost effect
with the most limited means is a characteristic trait of much
Chinese art, well known particularly from ink painting. And
although no ink painting of quite such bareness is known from
this early date, the concept is not alien to Chinese Chan (Zen)
painting and recalls the Six Persimmons by the 13th-century
monk artist Muqi.
Fish play an important role as symbols in Chinese thought. In
Chan Buddhism many stories revolve around them that are
quoted as reasons for the use of a wooden fish as a gong in
monasteries to call monks and nuns to prayer and to mark
other activities; in Daoism, fish are the ultimate image of a
glorified freedom from restraints; and in Confucian thought
they immediately evoke the scholar succeeding in the imperial
exams and thus assuring success in life, like the mythical carp
swimming up-river and turning into a dragon.
After varied results in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) and
Hongwu reign period (1368-98), the first impeccable reds
were reached at the Jingdezhen imperial kilns in the Yongle
reign (1403-24). Already in the Yuan dynasty, red glaze was
used to decorate stem cups, but no attempt was made to
lend shape to red splashes. Thus is the case with a revolving
stem cup discovered among the hoard of Yuan porcelain at
Gao’an, Jiangxi province, which is dramatically but unevenly
splashed with copper-red pigment, but in a different technique,
54 SOTHEBY’S 蘇富比
fig. 1
Copper-red ‘fish’ stem cup, mark and
period of Xuande
© Collection of National Palace
Museum, Taipei
which did not render the red anywhere near as bright (see Liu
Jincheng, ed., Gaoan Yuandai jiaocang ciqi/The Porcelain from
the Cellar of the Yuan Dynasty in Gao’an, Beijing, 2006, pp.
70-71).
Copper-red pigment used for painted designs under the glaze,
and copper-red glaze applied all over the vessel were both
passed the extreme expectations of the court; but the Yongle
period was a time of experimentation at the imperial kilns,
when tests were undertaken with many different materials
and techniques, and a considerable part was quickly rejected
and destroyed again before perfection was reached. As red
glazes yielded a stronger result than red pigment used for
underglaze painting, additional attempts were made to use the
to have been sandwiched between two layers of transparent
glaze. Several ambitious concepts were followed up, many of
them abandoned when they proved unsatisfactory, but some
retained even though the red did not fire perfectly well all the
way round – an extremely rare occasion in this period and
proof of the immense efforts such wares entailed. A Yongle
stem cup with three fish of red glaze among underglaze-blue
waves, and a stem bowl painted in red glaze with dragons and
a formal border, for example, were both abandoned at the kiln
site (their re-assembled fragments included in the exhibition
Jingdezhen Zhushan chutu Yongle guanyao ciqi [Yongle
Imperial porcelain excavated at Zhushan, Jingdezhen], Capital
Museum, Beijing, 2007, cat. nos 113 and 11). The magnificent
large Yongle meiping with white dragons reserved among
red waves, formerly in the Meiyintang and now the Xiling
collection, on the other hand, probably the most ambitious
project ever undertaken in this red glaze decoration technique,
was retained even though not all the waves have turned
a bright colour (Regina Krahl, ‘China without Dragons. An
Exhibition of the Oriental Ceramic Society’, Orientations, vol.
47, no. 8, November-December 2016, p. 98, fig. 10).
In the Xuande reign, the potters appear to have realised that
painting with a red glaze could work well as long the designs
were reduced to distinct silhouettes. This is when cups, stem
cups and stem bowls with three red fish or three red fruit only,
without any accompanying decoration and lacking even the
customary underglaze-blue lines around rim and foot, began
to be produced. The admirable, jewel-like colour and texture
of these silhouettes was achieved only in the Xuande reign and