WEI dynasty Maitreya sculpture

#Wei #dynasty #china #buddhist #sculpture #maitreya

Perhaps one characteristic of chinese sculpture that rarely gets commented on is the tendency to "frame" images even freestanding ones and how auras and thrones become part of the support structure whether the material is stone or metal yet the clothing becomes simpler with more drapes and folds and less jewellery. 

Note the date WEI dynasty. These are "ancestors" of those elaborate Qing Tibetan influenced pieces.

Perhaps the relative simplicity of paintings and ceramic sculptures featuring Budai / Hotei is a response or reaction to this?

Maitreya One

The first known images of the #Boddhisattva #Maitreya are Indian or #Kushan #sculptures to be more precise.

Clearly a North Indian aristocrat but the first Chinese sculptors to create Buddhist images made this WEI dynasty stele.





And later we get a divergence between images like this but also identifications and depictions of Maitreya as Budai / Hotei.

Budai is an odd blend of Chan eccentric and Taoist Sage.

More about this next time.

DEHUA GUANYIN

#dehua #guanyin #kuanyin #sculpture #ceramic #chinese

I know you can see dozens of variants on white robe kuanyin in the shops but there was a time these were technical innovations.

Here's an excellent example from the #AGNSW  Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.

It works in the round the fine detail on the stool counterbalances the broader drapes and the buddhist symbols are a natural extension of the image.

simple elegant meaningful and good sculpture 

the sculptors who created the first white robe dehua kuanyins had a special genius that often goes unpraised due to the mass production of copies

A HAN Ceramic Tile

A HAN CERAMIC TILE

#chinese #ceramic #tile #dragon #AGNSW #asianart

This is one of my favorite objects in the Art Gallery of NSW Asiann collection.

It's small and rough but yet striking and a bit of a mystery.

Is that an angle or a man wearing a cape. Is he dancing taming or fighting with the dragon. Is he a warrior or a shaman or a spirit?

As for the dragon notice how even in this early depiction it has a flexible body and some kind of head crest.

Despite its gray coloring this tile always catches my eye when I visit the Asian art room! It tends to be rotated in and out of storage due to its small size.

I love the composition too!

The next few posts will focus on Chinese sculpture in various mediums.

Western Han Rhino Sculpture / Vessel

Why is this #Chinese #sculpture Important?

Its also a #bronze #vessel #westernhandynasty a #ZUN and an "object d'art" and despite the inlaid ornament is a fairly accurate depiction of a #rhino !

There seems to have a trend in this era for vessels and small sculptures shaped like tigers dragons rhinos and elephants with the animals being depicted with varying degrees of either realism or stylization. 

The disturbing thing about this is that it suggests that either elephants and rhinos were still common in parts of China where they are extinct now or that these animals were used as subjects because they were becoming suddenly increasingly rare outside of remote forests or private wildlife preserves / hunting parks ?

Apart from the environmental history aspect its a magnificent example of how the Chinese created objects that can be defined as functional sculptures or vessels with sculptural values. Many of the best Chinese sculptures are small to medium sized objects and vessels in jade wood clay lacquer or bronze less so in larger stone though. Although the Chinese could carve and shape jade boulders large sculptures in the round in stone vary considerably in quality. 

It is a lovely piece of art though however you define or describe it and whatever its story is ?!

The Xibeigang Tigers

#Chinesesculpture #sculpture #tigers  #marble #xibeigang #shang

This marble slab carved with two tigers is from a ancient royal tomb not a temple. The use of marble is unusual for Chinese sculpture.

It does illustrate an abiding tendency for Chinese sculptures to work in a raised relief style even when doing large monumental works. One often gets the feeling looking at large chinese sculptures particularly some WEI dynasty pieces that the sculptors and stone masons were given a line sketch and told make this #3D for a tomb/ temple or however you would say that in Ancient China.

The sculptor was rendered the tiger in a stylised manner that reminds me of taotie masks on bronzes.

I wonder if they opted for marble because jade boulders of that size were not available but the rulers commissioning the tomb insisted on a pale color stone?

The trend of using marble didn't last for long. 

Carvers stonemasons and sculptors seem to be have preferred wood and jade and smaller stones until there was another sculpture revival in the WEI dynasty.

I suspect people who had the talent and skills and hand to eye co-ordination to be good carvers were put to use creating the fine details for the molds for casting bronzes for the courts or incising lines to inlay color on lacquer objects and of course shaping jade and other stones into pi discs!

However there are many noteworthy chinese sculptures which we will be taking a look at in the next series of posts.