Page 35 - Studio International - October1973

POST-LIBERATION ARCHAEOLOGY

IN CHINA

Its contribution to the history of art
William Watson

1973 will be remembered as the year in which culture absorbed something peculiar to
China emerged from the seclusion of the Great north-east China, whose connections with
Cultural Revolution into a new set of relations eastern Siberia were of very ancient date. The
with the external world. It is gratifying, and in contrast between the Honan and the Shantung
keeping with some ancient methods of aesthetic is made the more striking by the late
diplomacy, that she appears bearing gifts - an survival in Kiangsu of painted pottery, which
archaeological exhibition offered to the West derives from the Honan Yangshao but loses
(here staged at Burlington House) which should some of the old strength.
do more to spread understanding of Chinese The ritual bronzes of the Shang dynasty
history and art than all the books published (16th-I ith century BC) combined the trend
since the Liberation. towards graphic elaboration of superficial
It has been said there was a movement within ornament with experiment in the development
the Cultural Revolution which aimed at of solid form. Both these capacities of the artist
dethroning the art of 'the emperors and their were exercised within utilitarian limits set by
concubines' and destroying it together with vessels intended to hold sacrificial food, libation
other useless lumber of the past, but there are wine, etc. The extremes to which both resources
few signs of this. Certainly excavation and other of ornament were taken reveal conscious
Vase of red pottery with black painted decoration,
field research continued, if not unabated at least excavated in 1958 at Lan-chou, Kansu. Yanshao deliberation, although the work made use of a
not much hampered, during the troubled years neolithic culture. 3rd millenium BC. Height 18.3 cm narrow range of conventional motifs, mainly
after 1965, and many of the most interesting monster masks and dragons. In the past this
finds included in the exhibition were recovered geographical distribution show the urns to be bronze art was thought to have evolved slowly
during this time. From 1949 the main effort later than the central Chinese painted pottery and logically from simple to complex. Certainly
went into extensive surveys, which enabled allied to them, so that they cannot be invoked to the baroque extravaganza of some vessels
excavators both to assess the urgency of justify an extraneous element in the genesis of towards the end of the Shang dynasty, in the
rescue-digging sites disturbed in the course of Chinese civilization. We can, however, use the eleventh century BC, gives colour to this view.
public works, and to choose sites for deliberate neolithic pottery to demonstrate a diversity of But excavations carried out since 195o at
investigation which would yield a maximum of aesthetic feeling, implying who knows what Cheng-chou in Honan, the site of an earlier
historical information. Decades of plundered ideological differences, which divided China in bronze-age capital, only bear this out in part.
tombs and ravaged monuments, which the pre-metal age, and which the art of the Cheng-chou bronzes, representing the art of the
contributed largely to the private and public Bronze Age was engaged in reconciling. first half of the Shang dynasty, already display
collections of Japan and the western world, The contrast is between a system of surface the t'ao-t'ieh monster masks of the ornament
justified the imposition of rigid control for the ornament, in two dimensions, and a sense of in an advanced stage of linear elaboration.
sake of conservation. Before 1949 there was no form which demands the third dimension and Spirals and curlicues threaten already to
reliable documentation for Chinese antiquities, aims at sculptural effect. The curvilinear submerge the identity of the motif in continuous
figures of the Yang-shao painted pots of Honan
apart from that yielded by the excavations on the design. On the other hand the form of tripod
and Shensi are precise, rational, restful to the
bronze-age capital at Anyang, undertaken by the vessels - the most sensitive to changes in the
Academia Sinica and abruptly ended on the eye. Behind the angular and asymmetric vessels sense of design - are more naive, in particular
outbreak of war with Japan in 1936. Now the of the eastern neolithic of Lungshan lacking the rectangular rigidity of the later
cultural history can be rewritten, based on (territorially based upon Shantung) is a different types. It is as if the taste for sharp-angled
motive. Something striking is sought in the
material whose location and other associations profiles characteristic of the Lungshan neolithic
total form, which need not be confined within
are recorded. was inherited by bronze-craft in Honan, north
itself, but can reach out into the surrounding
A controversial matter concerning the of the Yellow river, and not to the same degree
space, so that a jug becomes something akin to
beginning of this history has been settled. The in Cheng-chou, south of the river.
animal sculpture, and, rather than reassuring,
great painted funeral urns of Kansu are among This conclusion may be over-influenced by
the best known of Chinese antiquities; with their provokes the eye. The prevailing theory in an older model of the evolution of the
freely brush-painted spirals and geometric China is that the Lungshan tradition needs no bronze-age art, which some recent discoveries
figures they are in a way un-Chinese, since they special explanation, because it was the natural tend to correct. What was known hitherto was
product of an evolution which started with the
have no sequel in the connected artistic mainly the produce of the city of Great Shang,
Yangshao and its painted ware, and reached a
tradition which goes back to the Bronze Age. near the modern Anyang in Honan, where
new stage in the same region of Honan. To
The Kansu urns were thought to be older than Shang kings ruled during the latter half of the
Western students the material newly obtained
any other category of Chinese art and it seemed dynasty. Apart from Cheng-chou, the
by excavation seems to emphasize the
plausible to suggest that their style was excavations of the past ten years have done
imported, or, in the manner dear to the separation rather than the unity of the two much to widen the picture. In Anhui, and
nineteenth-century imperial archaeologist, that traditions. No doubt basic economic progress, further south still, in Hunan, bronze vessels of
in the form of improved farming, came from the
they revealed migration into China from the far Shang date have been found. The extent of
west: ex occidente lux. But stratigraphy and region of Honan, but in east China the neolithic Shang political control over central China is
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