Archaic Chinese Art, and monster masks

 Early Chinese society was shamanic and animistic. There was a cult of ancestor worship for the ruling class, and they created many bronze vessels of high technical quality for use in rituals associated with ancestor worship. They are intricately decorated with stylized images and concentric scrolls and the fineness of the casting is incredible. The had a level of mastery of the craft using the limited technology that they had, and achieved results only equaled in recent years. The bronze vessels and jade ornaments radiate a type of power, and analysis of the images reveals hallucinogenic stylized images of animals and monster faces. 

The same motifs can be found on a smaller scale on the jade ornaments they made which are featured in my exhibition. These were pendants, beads, congs (squared cylindrical objects) and other small objects. 

Schematic of a monster mask, toatieh mask, from a Shang Dynasty vessel about 1200 B.C.

One of the basic motifs is the toatie, a monster mask and figure spread out over the surface split bilaterally, you can see the full animal on either side of the central face. In Chinese art these monster masks feature fangs and monstrous teeth and large eyes, and show a combination of feline and bovine features. Often there are horns and fangs, an un-natural but intimidating mixture. The feet at the end of the stylized limbs are always clawed in a feline manner. Often surrounding the monster mask are tight scrolled decoration of fine raised lines, called leiwein, which may be stylized clouds filling the negative space. Over time the style changes with variations, some plain, some highly decorated but the central monster mask motif continues until the end of the archaic period. The Han Dynasty, 200 B.C. To 200 A.D.,  can be considered a transitional period during which the monstrous imagery of the archaic transforms to the more purely decorative styles we now associate with China. 

Photograph of the monster mask on a Chinese archaic bronze vessel from the Shang Dynasty 

Photograph of a Chinese bronze much like the one which the drawing above is based. Here you can see the bilaterally split creature and the lei wein scrolled decoration filing the negative spaces. 

Jade cong decorated with monster masks from the late Eastern Chou Dynasty 700 -500 B.C.

This object is the heart of my exhibition. It is a jade cong with the monster mask motif carved in low relief on all four sides. A cong is a squared cylinder, with flat sides and a large round hole in the middle. It was a ritual object, whose use we don’t understand fully at this time. Usually they are early in date, Neolithic, Quijia period about 2100 to 1600 B.C., and in this case, I believe this to be a Neolithic jade cong, decorated centuries later. The Chinese had a great interest in their predecessors, and they uncovered early sites and tombs and revered the objects found there. It is an excellent example of the Chinese Monster mask, and it shows how this motif continued through the centuries of the Archaic period of Chinese history. The bilateral splitting of the figure is clear and here, the bovine elements seem to be dominant. One sees the horns and large eyes, but no fangs. But one does see at the ends of the stylized limbs the clawed paws of feline type. Also noteworthy is that the entire surface is enlivened with pattern, here rounded some of which form the monster, others seem just to fill space and others form smaller figures such one above the main mask. It is totally animated and as a result difficult for the modern eye to decipher, almost hallucinogenic. 

Jade pendant of a monster mask, China Western Chou Dynasty 1000 to 700 B.C.

This small ornament, a pendant as revealed by the hole for suspension on top, relates to the prior jade in that it features monster mask with large prominent eyes, abstracted horns, and mouth that almost looks like a beak. It is almost like an owl, but really cannot be specified as it so abstracted.  It dates to the Western Zhou Dynasty, thus earlier than the prior decorated cong. 

 

Jade rectangular pendant decorated with cloud dragon motifs, Eastern Chou 7^th to 5^th Century B.C.

Another piece in the exhibition is from the Warring States Period or later Eastern Chou Dynasty, 7th to 5^th Century B.C., in China. Carved of jade it is a rectangular pendant drilled at at one end for suspension and decorated all over with rounded relief swirl patterns that upon examination are stylized dragons. Sometimes called cloud dragons for the similarity to billowing clouds, it is very hard to read and separate one from the other. With no central image, it appears to be pure pattern until magnification reveals the cloud dragons. 

Jade cylindrical bead decorated with Cloud Dragons.

China, Late Eastern Chou, 5^th to 7^th Century B.C.

Very similar to the rectangular pendant above, this bead is covered in curved relief decoration which on examination are revealed to be stylized dragons, that we call cloud dragons for the cloud like pattern they create. 

Jade sash buckle, China Six Kingdoms period, 3^rd to 6^th Century A.D.

This is the latest jade in the exhibition. Difficult to date, I place it to the six Kingdom period, the period between the end of the Han Dynasty and the reunification of China under the Sui Dynasty, so 220 to 589 A.D. This includes the Northern Wei and Northern Qi Dynasties the periods from which the early Chinese Buddhist sculpture dates. I place it in this period as it is no longer archaic in style, but is more naturalistic, while still is a monstrous image. It has a lot in common with images from India and Southeast Asia of a monstrous protector of Shiva. It functioned as a sash buckle, and is rather large for a jade, with a hoop in the back through which the intercrossed sashes would be looped. 

Covarrubias, The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent

 Miguel Covarrubias, was a Mexican born artist and early pioneer of the study of pre-Columbian art. He spent much of his life in New York City in the 1920’s, and 30’s, and achieved a level of fame and success as an illustrator and caricaturist whose work appeared in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. At the same time he was a painter and did some public commissions. When he and his wife returned to Mexico City he continued to work and develop his ideas on pre-Columbian art, whose study was in its infancy. He was multidisciplinary in his approach, and willing and able to draw comparisons  between different cultures, unconstrained by the siloed approach scholars take today. In his time, there was not much known about the Mayans, and the Olmecs had only just been identified/discovered, and the timeline was conjectural and has been changed by new discoveries. The most important development since his time is our ability to read Mayan hieroglyphs and finally understand what was written on the buildings and stelas with inscriptions. But he had an eye, and his pioneering work is still valuable to us today. 

In his book, “The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent”,  he related the art of China to that of the Mayans, and made comparisons around the Pacific rim cultures with the art of various places of the Americas. It is quite amazing the comparisons he came up with, and attempted to systematize by types. His explanation for these similarities was a theory of diffusion, which is the transmission of motifs and ideas through contact with other cultures, either directly by a person from one culture finding their way to the other culture, or by transmission, with no direct contact but people being influenced by other cultures via intermediate cultures.  Diffusion is difficult to accept in this case, as the time and space differentials are so great. Archaic Chinese art dates to between 1500 to 200 B.C., while the height of the Mayan cultures isn’t until 300 to 1000 A.D., roughly speaking. But the visual similarities he highlights are uncanny and undeniable. And then there is the problem of a lack of evidence of direct contact or explanation as to how these motifs spread over such a distance and long time period.

Illustration by Covarrubias in his book, “The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent”. 

Covarrubias describes the problem thusly; 

“….the scientific world is now sharply divided into “diffusionist”(those who believe in an early diffusion of Asiatic and Pacific cultural traits through America) and “isolationists”(those who claim that all Indian culture was a local development)…..”

I would say it is the isolationists who are predominant today, you don’t hear about diffusionist theories. However, the isolationists also don’t address the similarities evident in the visual artistic record or suggest any alternative explanation. 

While much of the scholarship of Covarrubias has been superseded by new discoveries, he does present intriguing ideas that are not addressed by modern scholars. They simply ignore the issue as unsolvable and unexplainable and therefor don’t look at it. I do have some ideas for explaining the similarity, but those I will discuss later.

In this exhibition, I am presenting the early Chinese jades from my collection  in relation to the art of the Mayans from the surviving architecture here in the Yucatan. This exhibition is a visual exercise and meant to be thought provoking. It is a subject that I would like to see explored further and I am convinced that in time we will understand these similarities, as there is so much we are still discovering about the Mayans and ancient American civilizations.