ASIAN ART

DRAGONS, NAGAS and CREATURES OF THE DEEP

To celebrate the Year of the Dragon in 2012, the Textile Museum in Washington DC is presenting a global selection of textiles, depicting dragons and related creatures of legend. For millennia, people around the world have told stories of fantastical, serpent-like beasts with supernatural powers. Although depictions of dragons can be surprisingly similar across time and place, people in different cultures assigned these mythical animals very different meanings and associations. People throughout much of East and Southeast Asia regarded dragons and nagas (divine snakes) as highly auspicious beings associated with water, rainfall, and fertility. In contrast, many Western cultures portrayed dragons as terrifying, fire-breathing beasts to be feared by the common people and battled by warrior heroes. Whether viewed as good or evil, these powerful creatures often decorated garments and furnishing used for special occasions or to designate high social status. As such, many dragon-patterned textiles demonstrate the finest materials and workmanship available in their time and place of production.

Dragons are among the most venerable and widely evoked motifs in traditional East Asian weaving and embroidery. During China’s Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the Emperor and his immediate family reserved the right to wear dragons with five claws, these dragons were called long. Aristocrats and high-ranking government officials wore four-clawed dragons, called mang. On an early 18th-century Chinese imperial surcoat, one claw of each of the dragon’s feet has been carefully removed, transforming the dragons from long to mang (see right). This suggests that the garment was created for imperial use, and then presented as a gift to a recipient not entitled to wear five-clawed dragons. While some extant imperial lacquerwares feature dragons that have been changed from long to mang, this is a rare example of the practice in textiles.

While the Buddhist faith spread to East Asia in the first centuries AD, people in this region began to regard dragons as stalwart protectors of the Buddha and Buddhist law. The exhibition includes dragon-patterned Buddhist priests’ robes from China and Japan, as well as a rug woven to wrap around a column in a Lamaist temple in Tibet, Mongolia or western China. The dragon on the carpet has legs and haunches emanating red flames, indicating its divinity, while the frieze at the top of the rug depicts Jiao Tu, one of the legendary nine sons of the great dragon. His fierce visage is supposed to protect from evil and harm.

In India and Southeast Asia, people tell stories of nagas, deities taking the form of fantastical snakes. Like dragons in East Asia, nagas are closely associated with water, lakes, rivers, rainfall, and, by extension, fertility. Although nagas are typically described as beneficent creatures, they can cause harm by withholding water in a drought or unleashing it destructively in a flood. Water is the source of life and well-being for rice-growing peoples throughout Southeast Asia, and images of nagas appear in almost all artistic media in this region. The exhibition includes two pieces from Indonesia: a naga-patterned shoulder cloth made on the island of Bangka, off the southeast coast of Sumatra, and a batik hip wrapper from Java featuring nagas paired with their legendary nemesis – the aerial, bird-like deity Garuda. Naga-like ‘river dragons’, or ngueak, are among the most widespread motifs in the Lao-Tai decorative vocabulary. A ritual healing cloth (phaa sabaai) from Laos displays horizontal bands of ngueak in zigzag configurations, while a large lozenge near the bottom includes a diamond-shaped band of ngueak heads –
a potent defence against evil.

In many Western cultures dragons were imagined not as protective, but rather as a menace to be protected against. A silk velvet made in Persia during the Safavid dynasty (1501-1722) depicts a male figure in a wooded landscape wielding a large rock to combat a dragon. Featuring in ancient Mesopotamian, Hittite, and Canaanite mythology, stories of heroes fighting monstrous, often serpentine, opponents have deep roots in the Near East. Persian epic poetry eulogises several warriors who battled dragons, such as Bahram Gur, Iskandar, and Isfandiyar. None of these heroes is recorded as having vanquished his dragon with a large boulder, so the figure on this velvet has not been identified conclusively.

Dating from the 5th through the 20th centuries, the fabrics in this exhibition highlight the historical and geographical breadth of The Textile Museum collection while revealing the legends and imaginative images of dragons as diverse as the people who created them.

LEE TALBOT

Curator Eastern Hemisphere Collections,The Textile Museum

From 3 February to 6 January 2013 at The Textile Museum,Washington DC, www.textilemuseum.org. Gallery talks and tours on 11 February.

DRAGON

Evolved from a pre-historic totemic animal, the dragon has become a symbol of China to the world. Chinese people everywhere take pride in considering themselves descendants of this mythical creature. This exhibition showcases artworks that carry the dragon motif, either from the gallery’s own collection or on loan. Encompassing bronzes, porcelains, textiles, paintings and calligraphy, it examines the creature’s diverse meanings and manifestations in Chinese art, ritual and politics, while pieces from Japan and Chinese export ware demonstrate how the dragon has been adopted by cultures outside China.

Until 6 May at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road,
The Domain  Sydney NSW 2000, Australia, www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

 

DRAGONS AND LOTUS BLOSSOMS
VIETNAMESE CERAMICS FROM THE BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM OF ART

Some of the most sophisticated ceramics in Southeast Asia come from Vietnam. Although the ceramicists often borrowed from China, Vietnamese potters used their indigenous tastes and developed their own production techniques. In the 1970s, members of the Asian Art Society at the Birmingham Museum of Art recognised the beauty of Vietnamese ceramics and the potential for creating a significant collection in a then under-appreciated field. The museum quickly amassed a core group of 15th- and 16th-century blue-and-white export wares, modelled on the great blue-and-whites from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in China. The museum bought more Vietnamese export wares at the widely publicised auctions of ceramics from shipwreck cargoes that have revolutionised the study of Southeast Asian ceramics since the beginning of the century.

In 2010, the Vietnamese ceramics collection of Mr. William M. Spencer III, long-time museum patron and founding member of the Asian Art Society, was bequeathed to the museum. His gift greatly strengthened the museum’s holdings of Vietnamese ceramics made for domestic use and never exported, a neglected area in which it has been difficult to find material. This, and the continuing judicious purchase of outstanding pieces over the years, has resulted in an extensive collection, with many fine, undamaged, and unique examples. Along with The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Birmingham Museum of Art now has one of the finest collections of Vietnamese ceramics in North America.

Dragons and Lotus Blossoms: Vietnamese Ceramics from the Birmingham Museum of Art is the largest exhibition in the US to date devoted solely to Vietnamese ceramics. The entire Birmingham Museum of Art collection of over two hundred pieces is on display and illustrated in the accompanying catalogue. The catalogue includes essays by John Stevenson, Philippe Truong, and
Donald A. Wood.

Until 8 April at the Birmingham Museum of Art, 2000 Rev. Abraham Woods Jr. Blvd, Birmingham, Alabama 35203, www.artsbma.org

DIVINE POWER: THE DRAGON IN CHINESE ART

The Art Museum of The Chinese University of Hong Kong is celebrating its 40th anniversary, a milestone for the institution founded in 1971 as an integral part of the Institute of Chinese Studies. This February the gallery has organised a special exhibition featuring the dragon in Chinese art, which opens on 10 February.

Situated at Shatin in the New Territories, the university serves the community by collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting a wide range of artefacts that represent the cultural heritage of ancient and pre-modern China. A teaching museum as well as a centre for the research of Chinese art and archaeology, the Art Museum, which facilitates academic exchange between China and the west, offers an in-depth practice of museology through art history and heritage. It has the advantage of direct access to original works of art from the university’s Department of Fine Arts, and its collaboration with different faculties ensures an interdisciplinary approach to the social, cultural, technological and historical contexts of Chinese art.

Several commemorative exhibitions have been organised as part of the Art Museum’s 40th anniversary celebrations: A Venerable Scholar’s Legacy: In Memory of Professor Ma Kiam opened last September and was followed by Ancient Chinese Sculptures in late October. The special exhibition, Divine Power: The Dragon in Chinese Art, a joint collaboration with The Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong opens on 10 February to celebrate the current year of the dragon. It will feature some 200 objects including bronzes, ceramics, lacquerware, gold and silver, jade, glass, paintings and textiles in a chronological order from the Neolithic period to the 20th century. The image of the dragon is first seen on jade and bronze objects of the Neolithic period and Bronze Age. During the Han dynasty a prototype of the dragon was established, often as the Green Dragon of the east, associated with the other creatures of the four directions: the Vermilion Bird of the south, and Xuanwu (Black Tortoise and Snake) of the north, and the White Tiger of the west. From the Tang (618-907) to the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, dragons were a symbol of imperial authority and were used on decrees, in the administration system, as well as being the emperor’s personal emblem.

 YVONNE TAN

Divine Power: The Dragon in Chinese Art opens 10 February at The Art Museum, Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/amm. A catalogue accompanies the The Dragon in Chinese Art exhibition.