The Artistic Landscape of East Asia: Technologys3.amazonaws.com/prealliance_oneclass_sample/YzKXql3Pd8.pdfThe Artistic Landscape of East Asia: Technology Lecture #2, January 14, 2013

The Artistic Landscape of East Asia: TechnologyLecture #2, January 14, 2013.

Slide #1 – Title

Slide #2 – Stuff

Jennifer Purtle Page 1 2/7/2014

Slide #3 -- East AsiaL: Map of East AsiaR: Maps of Networks that integrated East Asia in premodern times.

For those new to the course, revisiting the idea of East Asia; Asia itself a term that perhaps has Semitic roots in the term “Asu,” meaning light, place where the sun rises; “East Asia” in modern times informed by turn of the twentieth-century Japanese imperial ambition.

I would like to define East Asia as the entity that emerged over thousands of years of trade, tribute, communication, overland and by sea, in the area we now call East Asia, all of which made some use of literary Chinese as a language of shared communication. This is very much like Latin in the European world; China served as a clearinghouse for the transmission and formation of cultures in East Asia much as Rome did in Europe. Lingua franca, lingua Sinica.

Not to say that Chinese culture is the dominant or superior culture; instead it is the medium –and not always a transparent one -- through which East Asia is constructed.

Teaching this course as a China specialist – my own awareness of how far I can go in Asia using Chinese, both as modern traveler, and as historical researcher reading literary Chinese. Acceptance, rejection, different patterns of diffusion – fluid, labile area of East Asia.

Slide #4 --Artistic LandscapeL: Tomb of Khai Din, Hue, Vietnam, 1925R: Cotemporary, traditional style Vietnamese lacquer

What is an artistic landscape? Can anyone summarize for those new to the class.

Slide #5 --ArtifactC: Cai Guoqiang (b. 1959), Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10: Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters, 1993. Pyrotechnic.

For those new to the class, beginning to build a sense of East Asia, and of Artistic Landscape. I posited in the last lecture that artifact is what differentiates man from other animals; artifact is thus one – if not THE – material basis of our humanity. It is from these threshold level products of man’s distinctiveness, probed and investigated through the methods of art history and visual culture, that we will study the people and cultures of East Asia.

As the Oxford English Dictionary succinctly, if not tautologically explains: “Artefact: n. Anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product. In Archæol. applied to the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as distinguished from natural remains.”


In the last class, I joked about how artifact is so tightly bound to the idea of human cultural production, that the OED definition suggests that extraterrestrials could not make them. So one wonders if, extraterrestrials are out there – they are the audience to which the contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang addresses his work (at least tongue in cheek!) – if they will recognize us as human through our artifacts.

Slide #6 -- ArtifactL: Haniwa, Kofun period (300-710 CE).R: Yanagi Yukinori, Hinomaru Illumination, 1991.

The humanity of artifact speaks to the present in extraordinary ways, from the earliest historical moments of artifactual production, long before the advent of the written word. For this reason, pre-historic artifacts must be handled with great care: they can be interpreted to mean many things.

In his installation Hinomaru Illumination, Yanagi Yukinori plays with artifact –namely the form of the haniwa, a prehistoric Japanese tomb figurine, the uses and meanings of which are not perfectly clear to modern scholars—by using them as a basic building block of his installation. By installing a series of clay figurines modeled on ancient haniwa figures facing the flag of the rising sun, being framed in the warm light of the Japanese national image, generated by a video projector.

In setting up the theme of today’s lecture, namely technology, and its role in the manufacture of artifact, Yanagi’s work might be interpreted to speak to one fundamental aspect of our recovery of the artifactual past the history of which is largely lost to words, to historical writing as we are accustomed to know it for later periods: this early history –as written in the twentieth century -- was largely informed by national interests, national narratives. Indeed, one might see these moments as the projection of technological competition into a deep and not fully recoverable past, to augment or offset technological competition, or ideas of technological superiority of a culture and its attendant nation state in the present.

Bob Thorp notes this problem in your textbook, on page 53. Thorp writes, “a different picture of prehistory in North China and neighboring regions could be reassembled from present archaeological data, perhaps one emphasizing linkages to the north, to the Japanese islands, or to Central or Western Asia. [Here, Southeast Asia should also be added.]

While I do not intend to remake the entire field of East Asian pre- and early history here today, I hope that by together looking at, and thinking about artifacts and the technologies used to produce them within the framework of “East Asia,” we might begin to understand these artifacts as the people who made them did – in the context of smaller polities linked by political, commercial, and technological exchanges.

Also, following Clifford Geertz’s idea of “art as a cultural system,” for the Neolithic and Bronze Age, we might use artifact/art to speculate, hypothesize, and historically imagine


the cultural systems that produced the artifacts at hand.

Slide #7 -- East Asia in the Ice AgeC: Map of East Asia in the Ice Age, ca. 40,000-20,000 BCE.

To begin, even the landmass of East Asia was not always as we know it now. In a moment of geological time, the contours of East Asia have changed significantly, now separating what were once more intimately connected bodies of land during the Ice Age, ca. 40,000-20,000 BCE.

This map makes evident how much simpler it was for man to migrate overland, how much shorter the maritime distances were between landmasses. When the world was much younger, in geological terms and in human terms – long before more became a sophisticated artifact maker – populations began to distribute themselves across East Asia. Some anthropologists propose that this connection might account for some residual similarities of what are now disparate East Asian cultures.

Slide #8 -- East Asia in the Neolithic periodC: Map of East Asia in the Neolithic period

What is the Neolithic? What does the term mean? Why is it used? What does it represent?

Neo == “new”, + Lithic = “stone” > “new stone age”[< NEO - + -LITHIC. Cf. French néolithique (1866 as adjective, 1902 as noun).]

Neolithic characteristics: Of, relating to, or designating the later part of the Stone Age, following the Mesolithic period, traditionally characterized by the use of ground or polished stone implements and weapons, and later by the development of an agricultural rather than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The starting date of the Neolithic varies in different parts of the world. Some archaeologists have used the first appearance of pottery as a criterion for dating its beginning.

>Pottery age: although Neolithic often defined in the European cases by the development of agriculture, in East Asia, it is the development of pottery that marks the Neolithic period.

Old stone age = Paleolithic.Paleolithic characteristics: Of, relating to, or designating the earliest of the three major divisions of the Stone Age (followed successively by the Mesolithic and Neolithic), when primitive stone implements were used, and now regarded as lasting at least 2.5 million years and ending at about the same time as the Pleistocene (c8000 B.C.).

Many histories of Asian Art posit the idea that “civilization” began in Asia in the Indus Valley of India, and in the Yellow River area of China. The map on screen, although it


http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&queryword=neolithic&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha&xrefword=neo-

emphasizes the most famous cultures of East Asia, begins to that “civilization” emerged at multiple sites throughout East Asia, distributed in ways very different from modern patterns of demography and habitation.

Slide #9 – Technology-Architecture-DwellingL: Banpo, Xi’an, Shanxi, 5mBCER: Rendering of wattle and daub houses at Banpo

What artifacts must man possess; what things does man make that animals do not; what needs does man have?

[Food, clothing, shelter; tools.]

Animals make shelter – how are human dwellings different? Diversity of materials; geometry of plan…

Pens for animals within village;

Agriculture: millet; also Chinese cabbage, 白白, Pigs and dogs. Nuts, berries. Hunting deer; fishing.

Burial: burying children in urns; burying adults in cemeteries. How does this work? Why?

Kilns, on margins of the village.

Society. Community.

What is technology? How does technology relate to those basic needs?

OED on technology: [ad. Gr. systematic treatment (of grammar, etc.), f. art, craft: see - LOGY . So F. technologie (1812 in Hatz.-Darm.).]

1. a. A discourse or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts.

1615 B UCK Third Univ. Eng. xlviii, An apt close of this general Technologie. b. transf. Practical arts collectively.


http://dictionary.oed.com/help/bib/oed2-b4.html#buck

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/crossref?query_type=word&queryword=technology&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha&xrefword=-logy

Slide #10– Artifact: DwellingL: Foundations of a semi-subterranean, circular house, showing post-holes; at Amsa-dong Neolithic village, on Han River outside Seoul.R: Reconstruction of early Jømon pit house, ca. 5000-2500 BCE

How does man learn to make artifacts? Develop technology?

Diffusion? Co-independent origination? Is there an “East Asian” primitive dwelling type? Pottery type? How would you know? Find out? [very different from India, Mohenjo-daro]

In many places, Neolithic is defined by agriculture; Korea, early Neolithic period still hunting, fishing, gathering. Korea does develop pottery.

Excavations of the 1980s and 1990s showed that early Neolithic period in Korea had close and extensive links with what is now China, especially with eastern Liaoning province, and the Liaodong peninsula. Similarities of pottery to that found in China, also Japan; dwelling types from Korea, Japan, China, and Vietnam all show marked similarities; the images here indicate the similarities of Korean and Japanese dwellings in the Neolithic period. Korean, Japanese, and Western scholars all acknowledge that southern and eastern Korea and Japan likely had maritime contact during the Neolithic period.

The origins of the Jømon people – name literally means “rope pattern,” because their pottery had such markings-- that is Neolithic people in Japan, are unknown; it is not clear whether they are the descendants of Ice Age populations, or immigrants from the East Asian continent. The Jømon began and remained a hunter-gatherer society, although they may have practiced some form of agriculture. Well-developed fishing culture; eating of roots such as yam, taro and lily roots. They also established trade among their communities – to trade products produced in different areas.

Slide #11–DwellingL: Houses on pilotis in the Valley of Mai Chau, Hoa Binh province, ca. 2000 CE.R: Reconstruction of a house in Sannai-maruyama ruin, Aomori prefecture, 4-2m BCE.

Diversity of building types: the reconstructed Japanese house from the middle Jømon Period also built on pilotis. Similarity of building types suggests possible diffusion of building ideals and adaptability. Do disparate cultures imagine exactly the same solutions to problems of humidity, flood; same solutions to different problems – flood/snow?


Slide #12 – Dwelling L: Jømon pot in hearth, ca. 5000-2500 BCE.R: Stone circle in Towadamachi, Kazuno City, Akita prefecture. Late Jømon, ca. 1500-1000 BCE.

What are basic necessities? What is superfluous?

Stone circles separate from, but close to villages. Ritual. Communal ceremonies. Also burials near by, but not directly underneath. Shift from land base to fish as staple of diet during Jømon – get more on this from Mason.

Relation of technology and adaptability.

Slide #13 – Technology-Ceramics-VesselL: Bowl with painted decoration, Banpo, Yangshao Culture, Banpo phase, 5m BCE.C: Detail of aboveR: Neolithic Pot, Yangshao Culture, Miaodigou phase 4m BCE

Why does man need vessels? What is the easiest way to produce them? What is the most efficient way to produce them? Do vessels require decoration, ornament? Why decorate. Ornament?

Coil and beater. Smoothing. Perhaps a proto-wheel, like a lazy Susan.Painted vs. incised decoration.

Slide #14 – Artifact: VesselC: Bottle with painted decoration, Yangshao culture, Majiayao phase, 4mBCE, from Minhe, Qinghai.

How does one produce this vessel? Is it an artifact? Art? What values does it embody? Of what technologies is it a product?


Slide #15: Artifact – VesselL: Beaker, Longshan culture, 3m BCE, 10.5 inches tallC: Stem Cup, Longshan culture, 3m BCE, 10.5 inches tallR: Liangzhu Culture, hardstone cong, 2500 BCE

How does one produce this vessel? Is it an artifact? Art? What values does it embody? Do vessels require decoration, ornament? Why decorate. Ornament?

Eggshell black wares: each component appears to have been thrown on a fast wheel.Longshan cemetery at Chengzi, pieces found in only 6% of graves, namely those with the most sophisticated infrastructure and richest goods; found near head or hand. Perhaps made for special persons of highest social rank and/or economic means.

Development of hard-stone carving industry. Perhaps used (burned) in funeral rites; maybe represented square earth (bi disk) represented round heaven?

Slide #16: Artifact – VesselL: Comb-patterned pot with pointed base, from Amsa-dong, near Seoul (same site as house, shown earlier), 4mBCER: Conical, round-bottomed vessel, from a site in Hokkaido, Initial Jømon phase, ca. 5000 BCE.

How does one produce this vessel? Is it an artifact? Art? What values does it embody? Do vessels require decoration, ornament? Why decorate. Ornament? Differences from continental objects?

How is the process of manufacture different? How does it serve a different utility? How is the process of using 3-dimensional decoration technologically different from using 2-dimensional, graphic ornament?

Slide #17: Artifact – VesselL: “Flame ware” (kaen doki) vessel, Niigata prefecture, ca. 2500-1500 BCE.R: Vessel with snake-form handle, from Togarisihii, Nagano prefecture, ca. 2500-1500 BCE.

What does this vessel do? How does it function? Is it entirely utilitarian? Artifact? Art?

Part of formal expansion in middle Jømon: practical, pots for cooking, storing, lamps, goblets, bowls. Cord markings of earlier period are being replaced by application of cordons of clay to surface to make three-dimensional designs. What they mean remains elusive.


Slide #18: Technology-Stone Working– OrnamentL: Group of Neolithic bracelets, necklace, ornaments, mask, female figure, Korea.R: Earrings from Kuwano, Fukui prefecture, ca. 6500-5000 BCE, Steatite

How does one work stone? How does one develop these technologies?Is bodily ornament, adornment artifact? Art? Necessary to survival? Superfluous? Can such things be found in nature, or are they necessarily manmade?

Craft production culture, ritual culture, adornment culture. Significant departure from Paleolithic practices. Possibly markers of social status.

Slide #19: Artifact – RepresentationL: Vessel with modeled ithyphallic design, Yangshao culture, Machang phase, 3m BCE, Liuwan, Ledu, Qinghai.R: Female figurine, from Gunma prefecture, ca. 1000-400 BCE, Jømon.

Do these artifacts represent anything?

Liuwan cemetery – collected, not excavated. Modeling onto the surface of a vessel in ways complemented by painted decoration.

“Ithyphallic” image: presents the male generative organ. Perhaps shamanistic image of power? Androgynous? Does this indicate the emergence of male power, patrilineal society in late Neolithic in China?

Female image: complete and freestanding; unusual in this way; tiny handle at the back of the head. Part of larger corpus: when Japan will record its early myths, women figure strongly as creators – Izanami (female), the partner of Izanagi (male), who gave birth to Japan; sun goddess Amaterasu. Is there an early societal precondition towards divine female in Japan?

Differentiation of possible broader cultural forms in late Neolithic period.

Gendering of power???


Slide #20 Artifact – RepresentationL: Head, Niuheliang site, Lingyuan, Liaoning, Hongshan culture, 4m BCER: Emblem incised on vessel, Dawenkou culture, 4m BCE, Lingyanghe county, Shandong

What is being represented? Can the status of representation change, and have thing still be an artifact? Is this a shift to art? Communication?

Representing an anthropomorphic form? Was does it mean to image a human??? Or image a shaman, deity in the likeness of man? Impossible to know.

Representation and writing… Are these the first attempts at writing??? Comes close to ancient characters.

Slide #21 – Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Neolithic Pot, Yangshao Culture, Miaodigou phase 4m BCER: Early Shang Bronze, jue ritual vessel, Excav. Yanshi xian, Henan

How does technology change the stakes of making artifacts?What different technologies are responsible for the making of these objects?Shift, for example, from ceramic to bronze; technological interrelation of these objects.

Is this bronze made in a way that evokes ceramic technology or metalworking technology?

In the nationalist stakes of archaeology and the study of prehistory, debates have long raged about which parts of the world invented bronze technology, and which parts did not possess this capacity for great invention, and thus received the technology ready-made.

Vietnamese archaeologists have questioned the primacy of “China” in the development of bronze, citing the problem that early Chinese bronzes do not appear to evolve from early Chinese ceramic forms, as the examples above seem to indicate. While the early Shang bronze does exhibit some characteristics of pottery – namely the smooth, rounded surfaces of the vessel, early Shang bronzes suggest a formal revolution –that is, a revolution of shapes of objects-- as well as a technological one. (Possible explanations)

Slide #22– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Neolithic pot, Vietnam.R: Situla, Dongson culture, Vietnam, 2nd cent. BCE or earlier.

In contrast, in Vietnam, Neolithic pottery and early bronze wares exhibit a fluid development, as the Neolithic Vietnamese pot at left, and the much later situla, at right, suggest. Indeed, the Vietnamese examples a fluid transposition of ceramic forms into bronze.


Slide #23– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeC: Situla, Dongson culture, Vietnam, 100 BCE -100 CE.

Fine example of the extraordinary craftsmanship – fine raised linear decoration from carving molds; by later times used lost wax process of casting, where a wax model is made, packed with clay, and then hot bronze melts the wax that burns off and/or exists the mold through small openings. Possible that earlier pieces were made with ceramic molds.

Slide #24– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Workers at Thanh Den site, Vinh Phuoc, Vietnam.C: Remains of a clay and brick pillar from a bronze foundry, ca. 1500 BCE, Thanh Den site, Vinh Phuoc, Vietnam.R: Round piece of baked clay, 30 cm in diameter, with pieces of bronze. Thanh Den site, Vinh Phuoc, Vietnam.

While the Vietnamese had not previously found evidence of an early bronze foundry in Vietnam, in August of 2005 – last summer – at Thanh Den in the northern part of Vietnam, archaeologists excavated a bronze foundry purportedly dating to 1500 BCE. This archaeological evidence may provide the basis for a rethinking of the invention, diffusion of bronze making within East Asia.

Round piece of baked clay – a pottery mold?

Slide #25– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Map of possible Dong Son diffusion of bronze casting.C: Vietnamese Bronze Drum, 5c BCE, Dong Son civilization R: Chinese Bronze Drum, Yue type, from the Han Dynasty, 2c BCE – 2cCE

Both specialists and amateurs have long posited the diffusion of bronze technology outward from Vietnam. Previously, the strongest substantiation of this diffusion came in the form of Vietnamese drums, which were found throughout Thailand Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and which were also traded into the southwest parts of what is now China’s Yunnan province, as well as traded up into southern China and the east coast of China.

Transfer of secondary technology: musical sound and perhaps sensibility, although we know nothing of what that was at the time of the drum’s manufacture. Perhaps used in ritual at point of origin; perhaps such foreign rituals adapted or influenced those of the localities to which such drums were relocated.


Slide #26– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeFar L: Container vessel, lei, Lower Xiajiadian Culture, ca. 1500 BCE, Inner

Mongolia. L: White ceramic vessel from Anyang, late Shang dynasty, ca. 1300-1120

BCE.Near R: Fragments of pottery molds for casting bronze vessels, late Shang

dynasty, China.R: Bronze tripod, ding 鼎, from Zhengzhou, late Shang dynasty, ca. 1300 BCE,

China.

There is a way of seeing, in material from China, a sustained evolution of decoration, form and technology from ceramic to bronze. This shift is schematically represented in the images on screen, which to my eye begin to make sense of this complicated transition.

The image at far left is a vessel from the Lower Xiajiadian culture, which flourished in the area now known as Inner Mongolia, which had contact with the Shang state, but which produced artifacts that indicate that Xiajiadian selectively adopted some traits of Shang culture but not others.

If you follow the textbook – Thorp and Vinograd—Thorp writes, on page 84, “Upon close inspection, the motifs include clear quotations from the mask motif and profile creatures known on late Shang bronzes. (Italics are my own) … Here Shang motifs are radically reworked, abstracted into conventional forms such as C-shaped hooks. To anyone familiar with Shang motifs the allusions are perceptible, but the vocabulary has been remade.”

The problem here is chronology and anachronism, that is a problem of chronology: the Lower Xiajiadian pottery vessel is contemporary with –or perhaps even predates -- early Shang bronzes, such as the one at far right. Absent written records that describe the process by which ceramic may or may not have influenced the production of bronze in China, one might wonder if decorative trends from outside the Shang state, such as those at Xiajiadian, may have influenced those within the Shang state, who reworked and adapted them to their emergent bronze culture. One might thus problematize the relation of Lower Xiajiadian pottery and its decoration to Shang production of white ware ceramics, as in the image second from left; the relation of Shang white ware ceramics to incidentally white pottery molds for making bronzes, and to the form of bronze itself.

Running counter to Vietnamese, Chinese, and Western archaeologists, it may be possible to posit a more logical visual and technological development of Chinese bronze making. Because of the role of nationalism in shaping archaeologically informed ideas of prehistory, I urge you to keep open minds!


Slide #27– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeC: The First Qin Emperor’s Unsuccessful Search for the Ding Tripod, from

the third stone of the Left Chamber of the Wu Liang Shrine, 151 CE.

This account of bronze is not as heterodox as one might suspect. In fact, it is possible to reconcile such a narrative with two of the most ancient texts the mid sixth century B.C.E. text, The Tribute of Yu (Yugong), and the mid fourth century B.C.E. Master Zuo’s Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo zhuan). The Tribute of Yu suggests the importance of soil from places throughout the empire, and outside the capital– perhaps including raw metal ores from which bronze (an alloy predominantly of copper and tin) could be cast-- and of things and images from the same places as the soil to early Chinese polities.

An account of Nine Tripods, the earliest regalia of Chinese empire, contained in Master Zuo’s Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo zhuan) sheds light on what bronzes represented in ancient Chinese political culture. The Spring and Autumn Annals make the following statement about the role of the Nine Ding Tripods in maintaining the state:

In the past, when the Xia was distinguished by its virtue, the distant regions pictured their indigenous things (yuan fang tu wu), and the nine governors [of the nine provinces] offered metal as tribute (gong jin jiu mu). [From these], tripods were cast that imaged [these] things (zhu ding xiang wu).1

The text thus explains that sending or metal, and images to the political center, allowed the early Chinese state to make tripods that represented the lands under its control by visualizing the indigenous things, perhaps animals like those on bronzes, which inhabited these lands. In this way, at least texts of the Zhou dynasty, suggests the ancient ways in which bronze ding tripods articulated centralized political control over constituent provinces of the state.

Slide #28– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeC: Copper mine, eastern Zhou period (770-256 BCE)

Image to give you a sense of how sophisticated the enterprises of mining and metallurgy were in the early Chinese state.

We know from chemical tests on bronzes that bronze formulae were very consistent throughout production.

Think about the power required to maintain such an industry: mobilization and division of labor, systems of transport for both raw materials and finished bronzes.

1 Translation adapted from The Tso Chuen, 292-293, in The Chinese Classics: The Ch’un Ts’eu with the Tso Chuen,

James Legge, trans., vol. 5, part 2.


Slide #29– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Mold assembly for the Si mu wu fang dingR: Early Shang bronze, jue, Yanshi xian, Henan, China.

Does the bronze at right appear to be the product of a ceramic aesthetic, or of an aesthetic informed by techniques if bronze-casting, as represented by the image of the bronze mold assembly? How might a mold for such a bronze have looked different?

Slide #30– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Mold assembly for the Si mu wu fang dingR: Cooking vessel, square ding (fang ding), Shang period, Erligang phase,

1600-1400 BCE, Zhengzhou, China.

Can you define a relation between technology of production and aesthetic of product?

Slide #31– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Mold assembly for the Si mu wu fang dingR: Reconstruction of the assemblage of pottery molds used for casting a

rectangular ding.

Four-legged ding were cast upside down? Why?

The axonometric image of mold from your textbook, at left, while great for showing how the mold fits together, does not give a complete sense of how the mold worked, was poured. I want to draw you attention especially to small openings that allowed gasses to vent in image at right; sense of packing in, working with reverse three-dimensional idea of the object.

Slide #32– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeC: Late Shang ding tripod, China.

What do you see when you look closely at a tripod?

Ding is a ritual vessel used for offering cooked food.

Slide #33– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeC: Vessel types.

Just to give you a sense of the many types of vessels deployed ritually by Chinese of the Shang and later dynasties.

Found in different numbers and combinations depending on the status of a tomb occupant. The I-Li reading gives a Zhou dynasty account of how different types of vessels were used in the performance of funeral rituals for the shi 白 class.


Slide #34– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: White ceramic vessel from Anyang, late Shang dynasty, ca. 1300-1120

BCE.

What do these vessels have in common? Do they share visual forms? Visual values?

Slide #35– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: White ceramic vessel from Anyang, late Shang dynasty, ca. 1300-1120

BCE.

What this shared form is or might be is the subject of much debate among scholars. Bob Bagley of Princeton University, following Max Loehr of Harvard, believes that these images are not zoomorphic, but are rather random designs the animal-like appearance of which is enhanced by the technical process of bronze-casting, notably the division of molds into parts, and the needs of those molds. (Bagley has also famously argued that this is much like the design of a modern, two-headlight car, which he believes owes nothing to zoomorphic or anthropomorphic sensibilities, and rather is the product of pure utility.

The other side of the debate most eloquently articulated by the late Harvard archaeologist K.C. Chang – the debate raged in person during my own undergrad career. Chang asks poignantly, “Is there ‘meaning’ in the animal designs on Shang and Zhou bronzes?” (K.C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual, p. 61). Chang proposes 2 ways of exploring the problem simultaneously: 1) by seeing if the evolution of the design moves towards the zoomorphic, or if the zoomorphic is always present. Chang argues that because the zoomorphic image has been evident even from the Neolithic, its development is a non-question; therefore, the images on bronzes must have meaning.

Chang believes that the meaning of bronze ritual vessels and their animal motifs is furnished by ancient Chinese in texts written prior to the Qin dynasty (256-206 BCE).

The ancient text, the Guo yu, of the 4th century BCE provides insight into the cultural work that bronze vessels with animal decorations performed. It states:

“Anciently, men and spirits did not intermingle. At that time there were certain persons who were so…reverential that they could understand what lies above and below… Therefore the spirits would descend into them. … It is these shamans (xi) and shamanesses (wu) who supervised the positions of the spirits at ritual ceremonies, made animal sacrifices to them in ritual vessels, and otherwise handled religious matters.”

From this passage Chang infers that bronze vessels and animal offerings were integral to the play of shamanistic power. He proceeds to re-read the passage about the Nine Tripods


as imaging the animal offerings, on animals that helped in heaven-earth crossings, on the faces of bronze vessels.

Master Lü’s Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi Chunqiu) provides an alternative take on the animals depicted on bronze vessels. It states:

“The taotie (what we would call a “dragon mask”), is conspicuous on Zhou [or Xia, in another version – that is the mythistorical dynasty before the Shang, which archaeologists now believe they have proven existed, but whose existence was long disputed] dynasty ding tripods; it has a head, but is bodiless. It tries to devour man, but before it can swallow him, his own body is destroyed. [This image was used to illustrate the principle of just desserts.”

While it may be impossible to recover the actual meaning of the images on Shang dynasty bronze vessels, these texts provide some sense of ways that people of the Shang may have understood the images on these vessels.

Further, the role of these vessels in sacrificial offerings is perhaps underscored by the modern meanings of the terms as they have mutated over time:

Tao1tie4 白白 = Dragon mask

Later Chinese usage: tao 白 = “fierce, cruel, gluttonous;” tie 白 = “greedy for food.”

Slide #36– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: Rubbing of a Shang oracle bone inscription recording raids from Tu Fang

and Gong Fang.

What visual forms, visual values do these objects share?

Symmetry around a vertical axis.

This kind of symmetry pervasive in Shang culture, kind of mirror-image dualism.

This kind of dualism figures even in the textual logic, rhetoric of the inscription on this bone, which states:

“On the guisi day, we divined. Ke inquired: No ill fortune during the xun? The king prognosticated and said: There will be bad fortune. There will be trouble that will be inflicted, arriving three times. Five days later on the dingyou day, trouble was indeed inflicted, from the West. Zhi Mu stated that Tu Fang reached the eastern border region and inflicted casualties in


two towns. Gong Fang also came to graze in our fields in the Western border region.”

Beyond linear symmetry of graphic design in the text of the inscription, there is a logic of call and response in the text that might be understood to be the literary analogue of visual symmetry.

The Shang royal family also articulated values of dualistic succession by interweaving, alternately, the succession of two imperial lines.

Slide #37– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: Drawing of reconstruction of a courtyard compound, Fengchu, Qishan, Shaanxi, late Shang –early Western Zhou, ca. 1100-1000 BCE.

The Shang people called their towns yi, a character composed of a square enclosure above and a kneeling person below. These elements signify the two essentials of a Shang town, a walled enclosure to mark its boundaries, and its obedient residents. Within Shang settlements, symmetry was also valued, as is suggested by this reconstruction drawing of a late Shang courtyard house.

That symmetry was valued is also suggested in a poem from the Classic of Poetry (Shi jing) that describes the town-building activities of Zhou people, and which may cast light on similar activities of the Shang. After telling of the selection of a site for a town, the poem describes the building of houses:

“… Old Tanfu the duke…

…Summoned his Master of Works,Then he summoned his Master of LandsAnd made them build housesDead straight was the plumb line…

…And in the time that followed [that is, while they inhabited these dwellings] they did not abate their sacrifices,

Did not let fall their high renown.”

From the retrospective position of the Zhou dynasty, we begin to see the importance of linear geometry in the ordering of daily life and visual experience. This was coupled with the perpetuation of ritual sacrifice, in vessels that shared visual values.


Slide #38– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: Ceremonial axe, Shang period, Yinxiu II, ca. 1200 BCE, Anyang, China.

The idea of dualism may also have underpinned Shang notions of the living and the dead, the one state integrally related to the other; it is through death that one could be “translated” from the human to the spirit realm.

This ceremonial axe, perhaps used for executions, pictorializes that divide, the head of the human victim – the very body part that the axe would sever – depicted as poised between two animals ready to devour it, receive that sacrifice. One might also read this image as one in which the transition of life to death is depicted: the human, transformed by the loss of its head, joining the ranks of the spirit world, and the animals who facilitated such transitions.

Slide #39– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: Bronze Executioner’s Axe, qi 鼎, excavated from Sufutun, Yitu, Shandong,

China; probably from an area occupied by another state contemporary with Shang. (32 cm tall).

Axe from outside the Shang state, expressing the shared values of execution and sacrifice.

Pictorially several possible readings: of the mirthful human translated into the other world; or the hungry animal waiting for sacrifice.

Slide #40– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Late Shang ding tripod, China.R: Sacrifical burials from royal tomb no. 1001 at Xibeigang, Anyang.

We do not know if Shang people feared or welcomed death, or if death through sacrifice had a different status than death through war (as described on oracle bones, by execution as punishment, or through natural causes); human sacrifice was part of both military prowess and appropriate burial. The Shang not only sent their great personages to the afterlife with expensive ritual bronze vessels filled with offerings, but also with human offerings to accompany them, either as family members, retainers, slaves – especially in the case of captives from war.

In formal, visual tems, one must also consider the resonance of the ways in which the Shang displayed their sacrificial victims in tombs with the ways they represented on bronze: note, for example, the high value apparently placed on linear symmetry, as is evident in the image at lower right, in which bodies of sacrifical burials from royal tomb no. 1001 at Xibeigang, Anyang are arrayed for burial. One must also note the importance of the head – skulls of decapitated persons were separated for burial from their bodies – this recalls the imagery of the executioner’s axe, and the disembodied heads of the


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Slide #41– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Marquis Xing gui 鼎鼎鼎 (gui = ritual vessel for offering grain), early Western

Zhou period (Western Zhou dates =1050-771 BCE), China.R: Marquis Kang gui 鼎鼎鼎 (gui = ritual vessel for offering grain), early

Western Zhou period (Western Zhou dates =1050-771 BCE), China.

At the transition of Shang to Zhou dynasties, in large terms a move from an unrecoverable past known only through later texts, to a period we know from its own texts, in its own terms.

In 1050 BCE, King Wu of the Zhou overthrew the Shang, and divided his new territories into eastern and Western domains. The eastern lands were the ancient Shang state; the Western lands, those held by the Zhou during Shang times. In the east, King Wu installed Wu Geng, a descendant of the Shang royal family, and three of his own brothers. By installing a mamber of the Shang royal family as partial ruler of a domain, King Wu established a foundation, lineage through which Shang ritual sacrifice could be perpetuated to aid the Zhou royal family and the Zhou state.

Now, under Zhou rule, however, bronzes began to speak, and to concete political reality. The bronze at right, the Kang hou gui, was producedin the aftermath of rebellion in the eastern counties ruled by Wu Geng; or rather, by the incomplete conquest of these areas by the Zhou. The bronze, which bears an inscription on its interior describes the attacks on the Shang, and then records that the Marquis of Kang, that is Kang hou in Chinese, was assigned a territory called Wei (W-E-I). A relative of the Marquis of Kang, who held the office of Land Tax Supervisor (situ) was associated with the Marquis of Kang’s rule, and was instrumental in the casting of the vessel.

Another talking vessel of the Zhou, that of Marquis of Xing, at left, records the relation between King and his vassal. While the translation of the inscription of the vessel remains hotly debated, the contours are that the Zhou King issued a decree by which the Marquis of Xing was granted control of three geographically-circumscribed groups of people. In return the Marquis of Xing offered formal thanks to the king and reiterated his loyalty, commemorating the occasion by casting the bronze in honor of the Duke of Zhou, regent for the young King Cheng, the second Zhou king.

Unlike the vessels on which their forms and decorations were modelled, the Zhou vessels were used in explicitly political rituals, in which sacrifice might be conceptualized as monetray – the expense of making the vessel – and in which the vessel itself makes its own ritual and political context utterly clear, in order that the cultural work it performs be intelligible to elite audiences.


Slide #42– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Meng gui grain-offering vessel, Middle Western Zhou period, ca. 950-850

BCE, Shaanxi, China.R: Hu gui grain-offering vessel, Late Western Zhou period (King Li, ca.

857/53-842/28 BCE), Shaanxi, China.

Perpetuating basic forms of bronzes developed one to two centuries earlier, and allowing those bronzes to continue to speak. The vessel at right, the Hu gui grain vessel contains a long inscription in the voice of King Li (r. 857/853-842/828). It begins, “Although I am but a young boy, I have no leisure day or night. I always support former kings, in order to conform to the will of August Heaven…” (Edward Shaughnessy, Sources of Western Zhou Civilization, p. 171.)

Slide #43– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Drawing of bronze types during Korea’s bronze age, from Phase 1 (8-7

cent. BCE to Phase 5 (2nd cent BCE.)R: Bronze mirror with geometric patterns and two off Center handles, late

Bronze Age, ca. 300 BCE, Korea.

Elsewhere in East Asia, we know precious little about what people did with Bronze Age artifacts.

In the case of Korea, the earliest finds are daggers, known as “Liaoning daggers” from Liaoning province in northeast China where similar items have been discovered. The problem of national narratives and archaeology is also quite clear here – since the population that produced these artifacts might be understood as neither “Korean” nor “Chinese,” but rather as a people who inhabited an area only now divided by national lines.

Korea possesses abundant natural resources for making bronze; the zinc content of Koran bronzes varies from 7-13%, higher than what is found in Chinese bronzes. Chemical analysis thus becomes one way of assessing point of origin. Additionally, Liaoning type daggers contain a high percentage of lead 5-9%, which also differentiates them from other Chinese bronze production.

Korean archaeologists date the earliest of these daggers to circa 1300 -1100 BCE, but archaeologists active outside Korean believe that these were produced in the 8th-7th centuries BCE.

Significantly Korean bronze mirrors differ from those produced in China in that they are decorated with geometric patterns, and have two off-center handles. By the second to third century BCE the work becomes finer, and more curvilinear, suggesting that molds may have been made from ceramic models.

Also, Korea produced bronze bells for Shamanistic rituals.


Slide #44– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Copper mirror from Naimatai, Qinghai, China, later 3 m BCE. (8.9 cm

across).R: Bronze mirror with geometric patterns and two off Center handles, late


Just to complicate things, I will add that there are similarities between Korean mirror designs, and very early, very small (8.9 cm) Chinese copper mirrors).

For those who have read George Kubler in The Shape of Time, one might ponder whether or not the Copper mirror from Naimatai is a Prime Object, and/or how the Korean mirror fits into (or does not fit into a sequence of replications?)

Slide #45– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Swords, halberd, spear, mirror, tubular beads, and magatama jewel from

Yoshitake Takagi, Fukuoka, Yayoi period, 2nd cent. BCE, Japan.R: Bronze mirror with geometric patterns and two off Center handles, late


The kinds of goods being made in Japan in bronze, as illustrated in the image at left, were not unlike those being made in Korea – blades, mirrors and bells, most notably. Indeed, many archaeologists believe that Japanese bronze production was spearheaded, and then influenced by, Korean bronze products and production technology. In deed, the handles of the Japanese mirror are similar to those of the Korean mirror, at right.

Yet, in the context of Japan, objects such as those depicted at left correspond to ancient textual descriptions of the so-called Three Sacred Treasures (Sanshu no jingi): sword, mirror, and magatama an e-shaped bead (an example of which is at the far right of the left image).

The significance of these artifacts of bronze technology is that they are described in chronicle of ancient Japan, the Kojiki as the imperial regalia given by the sun goddess Amaterasu to her son Ninigi to bring down to earth. Indeed, the mirror is understood as the device by which Amaterasu allows others to project her power, both literally and figuratively. Indeed, the grouping of sword, mirror, and magatama remain the imperial regalia of Japan, although the original mirror is said to be in the custody of Ise Shrine. Within Japan, at the advent of the Bronze Age, indigenous people perhaps beheld these artifacts of bronze technology as extensions of divine and/or continental authority.

Slide #46– Technological Revolution: The Bronze AgeL: Cast bronze bell, døtaku 鼎鼎, ca. 100 BCE - 300 CE, from Kagawa

prefecture, Japan.R: Cast bronze bell, døtaku 鼎鼎, ca. 100 BCE - 300 CE from Sakuragaoka,

west-central Honshu, Japan.

Additionally, more than 400 bronze bells, døtaku, have been excavated from


Japan. These were buried in locations away from settlements. Some speculate that all were imported from Korea; others emphasize the links to China.

Whether used musically, or only ceremonially is the subject of on-going research.

Slide #47– Technology-Ritual-Power

The array of bronze vessels depicted here: a Shang tripod, a Korean mirror, a Japanese bell, and Vietnamese drum are all imperfectly understood, and may never be understood as those who knew and used them at the time of their manufacture did.

Yet, no matter how crude our understanding, these artifacts show, through their development of technology, at least five abilities of people in the Bronze Age:

1) To understand the properties of ore, its transformation to metal, and the uses of metal as durable good, and perhaps as repository of monetary value.

2) To recast ceramic technology as a technology useful to the development of another technology.

3) To mobilize populations and resources to produce bronze objects on large scale, at well beyond accidental and experimetal levels of output.

4) To think about the role of durable goods, capable of spanning generations of enduring in the afterlife for eternity, in shaping ritual practices and in marking social stratification.

5) To use technology to create artifact that are optimally functional and/or beautiful.


Documents

The Artistic Landscape of East Asia: Technologys3.amazonaws.com/prealliance_oneclass_sample/YzKXql3Pd8.pdfThe Artistic Landscape of East Asia: Technology Lecture #2, January 14, 2013