Tag: Asian Art

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Daily Art Moment: Bactrian Camel

Sculpture of a camel viewed in profile facing left, its head thrown back, with mouth open, teeth and tongue visible. It has a small ear and round beige colored eye opened wide. All four legs are visible from the side view; the legs behind one step ahead of those closest to the viewer. Its body, neck, and head are smooth and are glazed in medium to light brown tones. In some areas the glazing appears streaky and drippy; a band of dark brown rings the camel’s neck at its base. Deep incising creates longish, shaggy fur in a creamy beige color on the camel’s head, mane, and underside of the neck running down to its torso. A deep green blanket in the shape of a half circle covers the camel’s back. Two furry textured humps protrude through two openings of the blanket. A multitude of creamy beige dots decorate the blanket and appear runny on the green background. It is edged with a fringe alternating between dark brown, creamy beige, and deep green. The camel’s foreleg has tufts of creamy beige, shaggy fur at the top. The camel stands on sturdy looking, knobbly legs ending in large wide hooves that appear rough and unglazed and are attached to an uneven, rough, unglazed, rectangular base resting on a modern wooden platform.

“This expressive camel, with its head thrown back, makes a bellowing cry that seems relevant to these times. Bactrian camels were often part of a larger set of funerary sculptures in Tang dynasty China. As symbols of prosperity manifested through the Silk Road trade routes, camels would have been placed with other ceramic figurines in…  Read more

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Daily Art Moment: Subok Screen

The entire composition of this screen consists of variations on the Chinese characters for longevity (壽, su) and good fortune (福, bok), arranged in alternating horizontal and vertical rows. The characters are written with astonishing variety, drawing on a repertoire of archaic scripts used in China as far back as the fifteenth century BCE. Making witty reference to the pictographic origin of Chinese writing, some of the symbols incorporate stylized drawings of fish, birds, plants, or constellations.

“Two auspicious characters, meaning longevity and good fortune, repeat in seemingly endless variation as the main design of this Korean textile screen. Across ten panels, with three columns of eleven characters each, the characters su 壽 and bok 福 are embroidered in brightly colored silk floss on a plain silk ground. The color in this…  Read more

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Daily Art Moment: Matsubara Naoko

A lone weeping willow tree and its reflection; decaying tree stump against a black background; tree blowing to the left against a gold background; white flowers and an open book on a green table and two chairs; portrait of a bearded man with only his head and large, folded hands visible; red twisted hands raised up to pick blue beans.

“Artist Matsubara Naoko created this portfolio of woodcuts while visiting Walden Pond over the course of a year. Her title comes from Henry David’s Thoreau’s essay ‘Solitude’ (1854), written during his two-year period of self-isolation. In these expressive images, she captures the fleeting moments of daily life spent alone. She also seems to understand both…  Read more

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Poster Project: Yosa Buson

A scholar sits in a tiny cottage that is perched on stilts over a rushing stream within a mountainous scene.

This week’s Poster Project highlight features Thatched Retreat on Cold Mountain by 18th-century Japanese painter and poet Yosa Buson, a wonderful scroll painting seen in our 2018 exhibition Poetic Imagination in Japanese Art. In this painting, Buson acknowledges the traditional ideal of seclusion—a scholar sits in a tiny cottage that is perched on stilts over a rushing stream. But what he…  Read more