Last week I checked out a couple of exhibitions at the Freer in Washington, D.C. The first, "The Tea Ceremony as Melting Pot," was a very small but well-curated show that explored the influence of international trade on the development of chanoyu (the tea ceremony) in Japan.
Trade with China, Vietnam and Korea introduced ceramics and earthenware with new glazes and motifs to the traditional Japanese ritual. I thought that the colors - vivid cobalt blues and emerald greens, as well as satisfying muddy shades of deep brown and russet red - were gorgeous, and the motifs, which drew from nature but also other sources were quite appealing as well. Lotus and wild aster designs were joined by a very darling pot embellished with a "rabbit in the moon," which piqued my curiousity with a distant, slightly hazy memory of the early '90s electronic music act that made sense when I read the accompanying text noting that the rabbit in the moon is occupied with "pounding the elixir of immortality." There were about a dozen objects total in the show, among them containers, bowls, vases, tea jar and other accoutrements, and the smart and informative exhibition text did a terrific job of exploring the role of trade and its impact.
The next day at a thrift shop I happened to come across Empty Vessel, Replenished Minds: The Culture, Practice, and Art of Tea, a catalog from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. The hundreds of objects that appear in the book, many of which are unfortunately not available to view online, includes a set of 12 granite tea utensils that is the most complete collection of stone tea utensils from the Tang dynasty (618-907), as well as "Eighteen Scholars of the T'ang," a scroll showing "a party of Sung [dynasty 960-1279] literati drinking wine and tea." My favorite by far, though, is an absolutely extraordinary teacup made from fa-lang-ts'ai enamels with a layered motif of peony, magnolia, and begonia flowers, dating from the Ch'ing dynasty, Yung-cheng reign (1723-1735).
Another exhibition I viewed at the Freer was Black & White Ceramics From The 10th-14th Centuries. The image seen above is of one of the standout pieces in the show, a vase with a leaf design etched using a sgraffito technique. The period in question was a time of innovation and competition among rival kilns. The first thing that caught my eye was a vibrant white dish with molded rim and carved decoration of lotuses, naturally, which dates from China in the 12th century, in the Hebei Province. The dish is made of porcelain coated with a a transparent ivory-tinted glaze, and boasts a motif of fully-open blossoms with swirly stems and leaves. The overall effect of the motif is bold, stylized, and sensual, offering the barest hints of both modernism and art nouveau in the distant future. Another piece, a simple vase from the Jianxi Province during the Yan dynasty, was rendered very attractive with a "tortoiseshell glaze" that admirably reproduced the authentic pattern with a technique combining dark glaze overlaid with a glaze consisting of splashed ash. The elegantly named sgraffito "is a mode of decoration pioneered within the network of Cizhon kilns ... in which a surface layer of glaze or slip was pared away to create a pattern and expose a ground -- either a slip or the clay body -- of a contrasting color. The vessel was then coated with a transparent colorless glaze and fired."
I especially liked the way that accompanying text traced both the development of aesthetic trends and also discussed the effects of consumer demands and the marketplace on ceramic innovation. For instance, at one point, "Tea drinkers believed the beverage's white froth looked best in a bowl of contrasting dark color..." while "The most famous writer on tea drinking, Lu Yu (733-804), extolled certain northern white ceramics as 'bright as silver and white as snow.'" "Black vs. White Ceramics" may have been a more accurate title given the forces at work on the craft at the time.
For a taste of the rich variety of styles evident in contemporary tea bowls, Eyebeam reBlog (with Wooster Collective's Marc Schiller currently at the helm) points us to the photoblog of "Ottmar Liebert, who is a renowned guitarist, and, apparently, a collector of beautiful bowls for tea."
Yet another exhibition I checked out on that same afternoon was the retrospective of Ana Mendiata's work at The Hirshhorn. Her Silueta Series absolutely blew me away, and I have much, much more to say on her work and its effect on me, but the thing that I found most immediately delightful was that Mendieta also used sgraffito in her work. She began to draw on fresh green leaves in 1982, and "puncturing, stippling, and incising the leaves. She employed an array of instruments including nails, needles, spoons, a stylus, ballpoint pens, and pencils. These impressions, often referred to as sgraffito, remained on the leaves as they dried." And they certainly left an impression on me.
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