Page 428 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

ch'ong ware, stoneware on which slip was applied lasting influence on the aesthetics of the Japanese flowers, Xs, or dots. Paired phoenixes allude to a
in a variety of decorative ways (see cats. 272- cult of Tea. flourishing marriage, and the box may have held
276), but on Ido wares used simply to cover the The initial instincts of the "finder" of such a valuable presents, perhaps a headdress with
rough gray stoneware body. In firing the glaze tea bowl were largely correct. The Ido type bowl accompanying ornaments.
and slip often bubbled, resulting in large granular was an almost perfect expression of the ideals of Mother-of-pearl inlay was common to the
formations of nodules where the glaze was thick- the early Tea Ceremony (Cha no yu): humble, decorative arts of China, Korea, and Japan, and
est, at the foot or even on the base. These rice rural, natural, and congenial to hold. The neutral flourished particularly in China in the Tang (618-
bowls, a staple of sixteenth-century country pro- "loquat" color, the rough surface, the granitic, 907) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties and during
duction in Korea, were appreciated and appropri- stony nodules of the base, the straightforward the Heian period in Japan (794-1185). Mother-of-
ated by the Japanese warlords who devastated shape and casual potting, all combine to express pearl-decorated Korean objects antedating the
Korea at the time of Hideyoshi's invasion (1592- the not ignoble ideals of the Tea Ceremony in its Choson period (1392-1910) are rare, one notable
1598). The bowls were prized for their roughness early and most convincing form. example being the thirteenth-century sutra box in
and simplicity, qualities that had come to be Today the world of Tea is far different: a con- the British Museum. With the Choson period
esteemed by practitioners of Tea, who included temporary tea bowl (J: cha wan) or a cold-water examples become more numerous, and early ones,
the officers and officials of the occupying army. jar (J: mizusashi) may be bought for less than half such as this box, retain to some extent the small
In a very real sense the Ido bowls are "found price it one does not insist also on acquiring the scale and finely detailed execution of Chinese
objects/' like the bicycle seat and handlebars of accompanying wooden container, inscribed not by works. On later objects the floral arabesque is
Picasso or the urinal presented satirically as a the potter but by a leading master of a contem- omnipresent, and the motifs tend to be much
work of art by Marcel Duchamp. Arriving in porary Tea Ceremony organization. "Kizaemon" larger and rougher in execution. In their boldness
Japan, these "old Ido" wares (ao Ido) acquired became a tea bowl in a far different time and con- and strength those designs recall the decoration of
an aura that only increased in the succeeding text. It exists in its own right and, stripped of the popular (or "folkish") Cizhou ceramics pro-
centuries of growing enthusiasm for the Tea old and modern myth, bespeaks the humble and duced in Northern Song (960-1127) China.
Ceremony. forthright virtues of what we condescendingly The style of decoration on the present box falls
The bowl "Kizaemon" was reputedly once call folk art. S.E.L. somewhere between the small scale of the thir-
owned by a seventeenth-century Osaka merchant, teenth century and the bold works of the seven-
Takeda Kizaemon, who died impoverished and ill, teenth century and later. Decorative fields
holding his tea bowl. All subsequent owners of bounded with twisted wire, as on this box, seem
the bowl were also afflicted, until "Kizaemon" 282 to be characteristic of Korean lacquer work. S.E.L.
was given to the Daitoku-ji subtemple Koho-an.
This tale has been told of many treasures, East and ORNAMENT CASE
West, but its significance here lies in its demon-
stration of the romantic and cultist nature of the i$th century
Korea
later Tea Ceremony. lacquered wood with mother-of-pearl inlay
The spirit of Zen, directing and confirming the height 15.2 (6), width 28.5 fn /4J, length 19.8 f/ /4J
3
2
new masters of Japan in their appreciation of utili-
tarian Korean farm vessels, helped to make the Tea Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne
Ceremony an insignia of the cultural elite of the
post-Momoyama (after 1615) period. In this The design, complex and well executed, is focused
development Korea was a passive and humble but on the lid, with a pair of flying phoenixes flanking
ultimately potent agent: invaded by the Japanese a circular motif (sun?) within a cusped cartouche;
(1592), despoiled by the invaders of not only its the remaining decoration on the lid, and on all
folk wares but many of the potters who made four sides of the box, consists of seven-petaled
them —and thereby coming to exert strong and floral arabesques within rectangular borders of

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