China: Journey to the East
Bristol City Art Gallery and Museum
PARTLY to coincide with the Chinese New Year and partly as a policy of making its collections more widely known, the British Museum has lent a large group of objects from its extensive Chinese collection for a tour of the country. With more than 100 objects selected from the museum’s holdings, in China: Journey to the East visitors are offered the opportunity to experience one of world’s longest and most influential civilisations.
In a brave attempt to cover 3,000 years of Chinese history and culture, the objects have been chosen to give a flavour of the range of artefacts produced. Five themes look at “Play and Performance”, “Technology”, “Belief and Festivals”, “Food and Drink” and “Language and Writing”. Objects include iconic inventions such as the abacus – the world’s first calculator – represented here by a modern piece made out of wood with porcelain beads decorated with lively, twisting dragons painted in blue on a white glaze suspended on metal rods.
Other inventions include the compass, silk production and porcelain manufacture. Insights are offered into the three main Chinese belief systems – Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – as well as the exuberant and colourful Spring Festival or Chinese New Year.
Some of the most surprising objects are a collection of fossilised and amazingly well-preserved pastries and tartlets dating back to the eighth century. What they looked like more than 1,000 years ago is anyone’s guess. Equally intriguing are a group of dishes in green-blue glazed earthenware made as funerary models. Each of the offering dishes contains a representation of such things as a pig, a rabbit, fruit, fish and seeds – the food intended to nourish the dead in the next world. Again, today we can only marvel at their state of preservation and the care taken in respecting the dead.
Other treasures include a delightful stylised figure of a woman holding a stringed musical instrument, a lute, modelled in porcelain, which serves as both a decorative figure and as an ewer. Painted in soft, inky-blue decoration in the form of peonies and other floral motifs, the decoration is perfectly in tune with the sense of quiet that emanates from the figure.
More conventional, but equally intriguing, are the ceramics that played a central part in Chinese culture. A colourful earthenware ridge tile modelled in the form of a celestial warrior riding a magic flying horse, some 500 years old, is seen here as it was rarely seen when in situ. Placed on the roof to ward off evil spirits, the exotic figure was left in place to assure safety and security for the householder.
Like any civilisation, there was much swapping and borrowing between different art forms, and none more so that between the bronze and pottery manufacturers. Bronze was expensive and costly to produce; pottery, by comparison, was cheaper and easier. A stoneware incense burner made 500 years ago is ornately carved with detailed serpents and foliage and coloured in deep apple green and amber yellow. Standing on three short feet, it is a ritual object, intended to be cared for and probably reserved for special occasions. It borrows the form and style of a bronze piece, but transforms it by colour and detail.
Supplemented by objects from Bristol Museum’s own collection, China: Journey to the East is a tight, well-shaped exhibition that offers a glimpse of the achievements of a long-established civilisation and one that is full of beautiful objects.
Emmanuel Cooper
China: Journey to the East continues until April 19 before touring to The Herbert, Coventry; Willis Museum, Basingstoke; Sunderland Museum and Winter Garden; York Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum
