Page 15 - Christie's Dec 2, 2015 Scholars Rocks, Hong Kong

collectively to the deep furrows, relief ridges, intaglio the expansion of the canon to include types that
lines, and other continuous interruptions that impart
a wizened texture to a rock’s surfaces. Zhou is the
sculptural equivalent of cun 皴 , or cunfa 皴法 , the
term used to describe the brushstrokes that texture
mountains and rocks in Chinese paintings.
Ming and Qing connoisseurs added several
additional qualities to the expanding list of desirable
aesthetic features:
Jiu 舊 , which means “old”, is used to distinguish
a genuinely old rock from one newly harvested or
carved.
Gu 古 , meaning “ancient” or “hoary antiquity”,
suggests that something is not merely old (jiu), but
elegant, appealing, steeped in history and tradition—
in short, pedigreed—and thus worthy of a collector’s
attention. Indeed, Chinese regard scholar’s rocks as
antiquities, or gudong 古董 , and categorize them
together with their collected bronzes, jades, and
ceramics.
Wenya 文雅 , means “literary elegance” and refers to
the sparse elegance of the scholar’s studio; applied
to rocks, it indicates that a particular example is
of sufficiently restrained, dignified form to merit
display in the study. During the Song dynasty, the
term xiu 秀 —“elegant”, “refined”, or “polished”—
was sometimes substituted for lou 漏 (“holes”) in
the aesthetic canon discussed above.23 By whatever
name, elegance thus has been considered a quality
of fine rocks since the Song dynasty.
Jue 絕 , which means “matchless”, “peerless”,
or even “perfect” is less a quality than a term of
praise reserved for those rare rocks whose unique
combination of aesthetic qualities distinguishes
them as superior to all others.
First collected in the late Tang or early Song period,
Chinese scholar’s rocks have been admired over the
centuries for their remarkable forms and textures.
Those rock types most highly prized during the
Song—Lingbi and Ying—are still deemed the most
desirable today, evincing the continuity of the
tradition; at the same time, each era has witnessed
CHINESE SCHOLAR’S ROCKS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION
collectors of earlier generations would not have
sanctioned, indicating that the tradition is vital and
evolving.
This tradition has evolved not in isolation but in
concert with the other arts, and thus rocks share in
the zeitgeist of each period. The historical literature
on rocks borrows from the vocabularies of painting
and calligraphy, just as rock aesthetics share kindred
ideals with those sister arts. Despite their obvious
relationship to the painting tradition, however,
scholar’s rocks, like bronzes, jades, and ceramics, are
actually part of the craft tradition, as indicated by the
complete anonymity of the people who harvested the
rocks, and of those who carved and finished them.
Because of their associations with both the craft and
the painting traditions, scholar’s rocks may reflect
the unity of the Chinese artistic tradition better
than any other medium. More than anything else,
however, scholar’s rocks reveal that the appreciation
of sculptural form in the later dynastic era of China
was as sophisticated as it was anywhere else in the
world.
Their artistic vision shaped from youth by the
practice of calligraphy, the Chinese literati naturally
embraced abstraction; from the Yuan dynasty
onward, their interest in the harmonious patterning
of formal elements carried them ever further in
that direction. While they never entirely gave up
representation in their paintings, they came more
and more to view brush and ink as vehicles for the
expression of their ideas, feelings, and personalities.
Such ideas carried over into the works they collected,
particularly the scholar’s rocks. Though understood
and appreciated in Japan from earliest times, this
phenomenon eluded understanding in the West until
the advent of modernism. While such Chinese literati
paintings finally found an appreciative audience in
the West in the mid-20th century, the associated
abstract sculptures, in the form of scholar’s rocks, are
only now commanding attention.
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