• Tag Archives bronze

  • It Is a Privilege and an Honor

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

                         Full Moon of Winds

    I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.  Let me try again.

    In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form that dominated Chinese material culture for 1,500 years.   Imagine if, say marble sculpture or fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE.  That’s the length of time we’re discussing.  Or the period of time between the birth of Jesus and the colonization of the New World.  That’s a long time in people years.

    To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of  Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced.  These very ku, kuei, jueh, ting, lei, tsun and fang i came into the existence through a complex network of Chinese people who lived over 3,500 years.   There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds.  Other people sold and transported them after they were made and for years, centuries, even millennia in some cases these objects were either used in public ritual or stood by in a tomb ready to provide service in the afterlife.  Think of that. 

    Think of the journey that graceful jueh had to take both as a created work of art, then, after that, as an artifact of a long dead culture now thousands of miles from its point of origin.  That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.

    The conceptual world that brought this work into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world had such a profound grip on the Chinese mentality that it stayed pretty much intact for the entire Shang dynasty, then only gradually lost its force in the later Western Zhou.  Those are powerful ideas.  Ideas can be more fragile than any ceramic; yet, these objects testify to the energizing and creative force these ideas carried, not just for a while but for hundreds of years.

    To put myself back in those times, to feel the ebb and flow of both the material culture and the beliefs that animated it, is to come alive to the human experience in a way I can’t in any other way.  It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public. 


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  • High-Tech, High-Touch

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  bar steady 30.37  4mph NNW dewpoint 27

                        Full Moon of Winds

    Out of the bronze age.  This was a splendid tour and a testimony to the high tech-high touch maxim of Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock.  This was 7 people, four Chinese and three Caucasian, who met through the Meet-Up website.  They had all indicated an interest in things Chinese.  Thus, this was a random group save for their convergence on Meet-Up through their interest in a far-off land.  Amazing.  There we were, more or less strangers, together to study the bronze tradition of ancient China.   So we did.

    We moved from the ceramic cases where we discussed the influence of Neolithic ceramic shapes on bronze vessels and the transition from ceramics to bronze as the primary artistic medium, then trekked over the bronze gallery.  There we started with the oldest object in our bronze collection, the jueh wine warmer.  After we identified some of the shapes from the ceramic cases:  hu, lei and ku for example, we dove into piece-mold casting.  This led to a conversation about design and the convergence here between technology and design.    

    We followed the t’ao t’ieh mask until it faded in the mid-Zhou dynasty and noticed the birds and more abstract designs that followed.  As the Eastern Zhou began we noticed the change in inscriptions and the shift from public ritual to private artifact until in the Warring States period the bronze vessels no longer had a sacred connotation primarily but had become objects of status. 

    To end we noticed the more modest bronze work of the Han and finished in the Sung dynasty ceramics with a celadon ting in miniature.  Bronze vessels had become a treasured objet d’art.   


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged