32\u00a0 bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28\u00a0 Spring<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Full Moon of Winds<\/p>\n
I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.\u00a0 Let me try again.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 Imagine if, say marble sculpture or\u00a0fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE.\u00a0 That’s the length of time we’re discussing.\u00a0 Or the period of time between the birth\u00a0of Jesus and the colonization of the New World.\u00a0 That’s a long time in people years.<\/p>\n
To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of\u00a0 Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Think of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.<\/p>\n
The conceptual world that brought this work\u00a0into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world\u00a0had 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.\u00a0 Those are powerful ideas.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
32\u00a0 bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28\u00a0 Spring \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Full Moon of Winds I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.\u00a0 Let me try again. In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form … Continue reading It Is a Privilege and an Honor<\/span>