Ongoing exhibition shares stories of China-foreign craftsmanship exchanges

On display at the exhibition is a black lacquer tea bowl, its interior and outer wall subtly decorated with hair-thin, intermittently shimmering golden lines. These evoke the famed "hare's-fur" porcelain tea bowls of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), in which iron-rich glazes fired at high temperatures produced fine, streak-like markings resembling the soft strands of a hare's fur.

According to Clarissa von Spee, curator of the 2023 exhibition China's Southern Paradise: Treasures From the Lower Yangzi (Yangtze) Delta, held at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the United States, during China's Tang and Song dynasties, novice monks from Japan and the Korean Peninsula came to the region where, taught in monasteries by Buddhist masters, they received an education that was not only religious, but also literary, aesthetic and philosophical.

A minimalist aesthetic, coupled with a cultivated regard for antiquity, found ready resonance in Japan.

However, with lacquer art, Japanese artisans didn't simply preserve what they learned; they transformed it, technically and aesthetically, most notably through maki-e, in which gold or silver powder is delicately sprinkled onto wet lacquer and sealed through successive layers. The result is decorative brilliance and a surface where light is carefully modulated and controlled.

Also added is a marked preference for mother-of-pearl inlay, whose shifting iridescence offers a counterpoint to the steady glow of metal, a practice facilitated by the country's ready access to marine resources.

With its emphasis on precision and restraint, the latter achieved through a measured use of pictorial emptiness in the depiction of nature and the seasons, the technique reached a highly refined, codified form during the Edo period. In this phase, its influence extended not only to Europe but also, in a reversal of earlier transmissions, back to China during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).