| Original Message: The pleasures of jade 1 |
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Hi jake, everyone, In contrast to the ugliness of the way the stone is treated in so many of these imitation- archaic jade carvings, I've been thinking about the sheer pleasure that comes from handling the real thing. That's one of the main reasons why jade has occupied a preeminent place in Chinese culture for at least six millennia - it's a handling material par excellence - and why it has come to be associated with virtue and purity. So there's something particularly nasty about how the stone gets messed up in these modern fakes. (It's not really just a recent phenomenon; in the Ming dynasty when there was a fashion for archaistic objects among the new merchant class, jade carvings were frequently burnt to imitate ancient oxidization, or altering, as it's called.) Anyway, I thought I'd take a few pictures to try to give a sense of the pleasure that there is in authentic jade surfaces and the ways in which skilled carvers used this hard stone so fluidly. Unfortunately, I'm still just as bad at taking close-up as I always have been, so these pictures give just a faint impression of what I wanted to communicate. But here they are - with apologies and good intentions. The first one shows the surface of a Hongshan jade which dates to the fourth millennium BCE. The second is a corner of a lovely cong from the Zhou dynasty, mid-first millennium BCE. By that point the cong, which had been a ritual object possibly used in divination, had become purely decorative. Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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