Chinese Art

As the history of Chinese art unfolds, we will find that its characteristic and unique beauty lies in the fact that it is an expression of this very sense of attunement. Is that one reason why Westerners, often with no other interest in Chinese civilization, collect and admire Chinese art with such enthusiasm? Do they sense, perhaps, that the forms which the Chinese artist and craftsman have created are natural forms-forms which seem to have evolved inevitably by the movement of the maker's hand, in response to an intuitive awareness of a natural rhythm? Chinese art does not demand of us, as does Indian art, the effort to bridge what often seems an unbridgeable gulf between extremes of physical form and metaphysical content; nor will we find in it that preoccupation with formal and intellectual considerations which so often makes western art difficult for the Asian mind to accept. The forms of Chinese art are beautiful because they are in the widest and deepest sense harmonious, and we can appreciate them because we too feel their rhythms all around us in nature, and instinctively respond to them. These rhythms, moreover, this sense of inner life expressed in line and contour, are present in Chinese art from its earliest beginnings.

A general survey of all the bronze types and their decoration is not possible in an introductory book such as this, but we can see how effectively various elements may be combined in a typical vessel such as the magnificent chia in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City. The main decoration consists of t'ao-t'ieh masks divided down the centre by a low flange and standing out against a background of spirals, called lei-wen by Chinese antiquarians from their supposed resemblance to the archaic form of the character lei, 'thunder'. However, like the endless spirals painted on the Yangshao pottery, their meaning (if any) is lost. The t'ao-t'ieh has large 'eyebrows' or horns; a frieze of long-tailed birds fills the upper zone while under the lip is a continuous band of 'rising blades' containing the formalized bodies of the cicada, a common symbol of regeneration in Chinese art.

Perhaps the Shang potter applying these simple geometric forms noticed how a pair of stamped circles suggested eyes, superimposed volutes became eyebrows, and how suddenly, as if by accident, the design had taken on the character of a dragon or a monster mask. That such a process-namely the evolution of a recognizable form out of a purely decorative abstraction-is possible in Chinese art (even though it disobeys the accepted laws for the development of most primitive art) we know from the parallel evolution in the Han Dynasty of some of the earliest forms of Chinese landscape painting out of the abstract whorls and volutes which decorate the inlaid bronzes and painted lacquers.

As we survey the inlaid bronzes of Chin-ts'un, the mirrors of Shouchou, the marvellous lacquer-ware of Changsha , the jades and the minor arts, we become aware that the period between 500 and 200 B.C. was one of the great epochs in the history of Chinese art. Moreover, the forms perfected during these restless years, the vocabulary and syntax, as it were, of Chinese art, were to remain the characteristic modes of artistic expression throughout her later history.

The modelling is massive but shallow, giving the impression more of two reliefs back to back than of carving in the round, and indeed in its heavy, flat and somewhat coarse treatment this piece is from the technical point of view more reminiscent of the Sasanian rock-cut reliefs at Tak-i Bustan in Persia than of anything in early Chinese art.