Chinese Statues of the

CHINESE STATUES OF THE 7TH CENTURY A.D.

1. Vairochana Buddha, colossal statue at Lung-Men, Ho-nan, about 676 3. Seated Bodhisattva, T'ien Lung Shan, Shan-si, T'ang period 2. Standing Bodhisattva from Lung-Men. Ho-nan, Tang period, 619-906 4. Seated Bodhisattva, T'ien Lung Shan, Shan-si, T'ang period the general stylistic current of T'ang art. Some of them show plastic motives which really did not come into vogue until some time after 700, but this may be due to the fact that they were made under foreign influence. The earliest among these sculptures are remarkably fresh and subtle while the later ones are com paratively heavy and commonplace works. The best specimens of the earlier types are to be seen in caves 6 and 14, while the later ones are found in caves 17, 19, 20 and 21.

The main group on the back wall of cave 6 consists of a Buddha seated cross-legged on a high pedestal accompanied by two side figures, which, however, are almost eaten away by time and run ning water, but there is a Bodhisattva on the side wall which can still be enjoyed. The figure is seated on a round lotus pedestal with the legs folded but not crossed. He leans toward the right side and turns slightly in the waist, a movement which is accentu ated by the turning of the head in the same direction. The left hand is placed on the leg in front as if to give added support to the body and make the free attitude still more restful. The body is entirely bare, except for a jewelled necklace and the narrow scarf which is draped in a diagonal curve from the right shoulder. The ease of the posture in conjunction with the sensitive modelling of the youthful body endow this figure with a sensual charm which is very seldom found in Chinese statues. It would hold its place beside the most exquisite French sculptures of the i8th century and yet it impresses us just as much by its dignity and composure.

A similar artistic conception is expressed in a still ampler form in a Bodhisattva statue in cave 16. The posture of the figure is a kind of lalitasana (position of ease) . It is seated with the one leg pendant, the other bent crosswise over the seat, but the foot is not placed on the opposite leg. The left elbow is practically touching the knee, as if to support the body which leans over toward the side, turning at the same time slightly in the waist. The movement of the head follows in the opposite direction, pro ducing thus a contraposto effect which, although not very pro nounced, serves to bring out the beauty of the ripe body and the supple limbs. It may not have quite the charm of the one noticed above, but it shows an astonishingly free treatment of the mantle, the material being a kind of draperie mouillee.

None of the other caves at T'ien Lung Shan contains statues of a corresponding importance, although there are some which reveal the strong Indian influence both in their general shapes and in the treatment of their garments. The heads, which in late years have been knocked off and spread all over the Western world, are sometimes beautiful, though less expressive than the best heads from Lung Men or earlier centres of Buddhist sculp ture in China.

Changes in Style.

Similar tendencies toward a freer plastic style may also be observed in contemporary sculptures from Shensi and Chihli. Among them may be seen beautiful Bodhisat tvas which not only bend in the waist but also turn on the hips, making thus quite complicated movements, which tend to bring out the beauty and significance of their corporeal form. By these freer postures their likeness to ordinary human beings becomes more striking. They sometimes remind one of the complaint of the philosopher from the end of the T'ang period who said that the artists were losing their reverent attitude toward the religious motives and were representing the Bodhisattvas in the shape of court ladies.

The difference between the religious and the secular motives seems, as a matter of fact, to become less and less important, and one meets with quite realistic genre figures not only in clay but also executed on a large scale in stone, very much according to the same formula as the Bodhisattvas. As a good example of this class of work may be mentioned a statue of a young lady (in the Academy of Art in Tokyo) who sits on a bank with crossed legs playing a lute, while a dog and a cat are frolicking at her feet, a statue without any religious pretext, with the same amount of free and elegant realism as we know from the tomb statuettes in clay and from some Tang paintings. Works of this kind indicate that the sculptors no longer remained satisfied with the purely religious inspiration but turned their attention towards nature and human life. If the evolution had continued along these lines, the plastic arts in China might have become just as expressive and varied in their interpretations of purely artistic problems as Renaissance sculpture in Europe, but the creative power turned more and more from sculpture to painting.

Quite interesting as examples of the new tendencies of style are certain statues made at Ting Chou in Chihli, a centre of sculptural activity which, as we have seen, was important ever since the Northern Wei period. The best of these are surprisingly free and illustrate a new interest in movement and in the full development of the human figure. Among them may be mentioned a large statue of a headless Bodhisattva in the collection of Mrs. J. D. Rocke feller Jr. in New York, which is represented in a forward stride. The figure is composed in a similar way to some early Renaissance statues represented in a walking posture, e.g., St. John the Baptist —and shows the same shortcomings in the stiff limbs and the stilted rhythm, but also the same endeavour to treat the plastic form in the full round.

There are many other statues illustrating this tendency. The most original is perhaps a bare-headed monk who stands turned sideways with hands folded before the chest and head thrown back, looking almost straight upwards (in the collection of General Munthe, Peking). The movement expresses an intense religious devotion, not in the usual restrained and well-balanced form but with the flow of human feeling which leads our thoughts away from the Orient toward the most emotional religious art of Europe, such as we know it from the late Gothic and Baroque periods. The impressionistic treatment of the soft and heavy mantle points in the same direction.

The Post-T'ang Periods.

The production of religious sculp ture decreases more and more towards the end of the T'ang period. Very few dated specimens are known from the 9th century, while those from the 8th are quite numerous. During the following periods of the Five Dynasties and the Northern Sung the creative energy of the nation, which in former times, particularly when religious devotion ran high, had been largely directed to the pro duction of sculpture, turned to painting, which now definitely took the lead among the fine arts in China. The change in the relative importance of sculpture and painting is also illustrated by the fact that sculpture responded more and more to the influence of painting, an influence which became evident not only in the new impressionistic tendencies of style but also by the fact that other materials than stone and bronze came into vogue, partic ularly wood, clay, iron and lacquer-work, and these were usually treated with colour. Many of the new compositions introduced about this time were derived from contemporary paintings. It is true for instance of the very popular Kuanyin Bodhisattvas in the maharajalila (posture of royal ease) executed in stone, clay and wood, and it may also be observed in the combination of the figures with backgrounds treated like rocky landscapes or some kind of scenery with trees, buildings, animals and small human beings.

This more or less pictorial kind of sculpture spread all over northern China during the i ath and 13th centuries, when Buddhist art enjoyed a short period of reflorescence, and wooden sculpture particularly reached a high degree of perfection. A great num ber of wooden statues have in later years been brought from China to various Western collections, e.g., the museums in Phila delphia, Chicago and Toronto which alone contain more such statues than can be mentioned here. The majority of these repre sent either standing Bodhisattvas in long garments which often take on a fluttering movement toward the feet, or Kuanyins on rocky seats in the maharajalila posture. One of the standing figures in Toronto is said to have been dated by a tablet inserted in the figure in the year 1106, while one of the seated Kuanyins, lately belonging to the Ton Ying company in New York, carries an inscription with the date 1168. Similar ones are to be found in the British Museum, in the museums in Boston and Chicago, in the Musee Guimet and Collection Jean Sauphar in Paris, etc.

It is during this period that Kuanyin, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, definitely changes into a feminine being usually repre sented in a free and elegant form, whether she be seated on a rock by the water in the maharajalila posture, as in so many of these wooden figures, or is standing, bending forward as if lend ing a listening ear to the invocations of her adorers. The womanly beauty is much more accentuated in these figures than any bodhisattvic qualities. The form has lost all its abstract serenity and become fluttering and emotional, but it is sometimes highly decorative in a new and more limited sense. Many of these figures seem to have been conceived not for a moral purpose, like the old Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but simply to please the eye and the sentimental longings of the worshippers. Besides these wooden sculptures there are a good many made in stone, par ticularly series of Arhats, who are usually represented in series of 16 or 18, according to definite types and with more realistic than artistic expression. Interesting series of such Arhats exe cuted in stone may be seen at the Yen Sha Tung and Ling Yen Ssu caves near Hangchow, as well as in the museum at Toronto. They are very uneven in quality and, on the whole, more inter esting from an historical than from an artistic point of view.

Yuan Dynasty.

After the establishment of the Yuan dynasty (1280-1367) the position of the fine arts in China, including sculp ture, changed considerably. The Mongols brought no new positive inspiration, on the contrary they destroyed more than they built up, except perhaps in the art of war. Art was useful to them only in so far as it could support and glorify the temporal power of the emperor and his generals. The religious attitude of the Yuan emperors was on the whole tolerant, but officialdom was then thoroughly Confucian and the Buddhists were pushed into the background. Taoism seems now to have held its place by the side of Buddhism. The cave sculptures at Hao Tien Kuan, south of T'aiyiian-fu in Shansi, executed at the end of the i3th century, are in this respect very interesting. Some of the compositions illustrating scenes from the life of the Taoist philosopher Pi Yun Ssu, besides a great number of other Immortals, reveal an evident interest in nature as, for instance, the old man on his deathbed; he is represented lying soundly asleep on the Chinese "kang" clad in a long garment. The most successful portions in these grottos are, however, the purely decorative compositions, the low reliefs on the walls representing clouds and phoenixes, and the two guardians at the sides of one of the entrances whose fluttering draperies are arranged in ornamental curves. All these decorative designs are characterized by a buoyancy and a vigour which are hardly to be found in Chinese sculpture of the immediately pre ceding period. The motives are used for decoration rather than for the expression of purely plastic ideas. The pictorial tendency which characterizes the sculptures of the preceding period is still existent, although it has become coarser and of a more superficial kind. The same stylistic tendencies are also quite noticeable in a number of other sculptures of the same period, such as the four Lokapalas (guardians of the world) on the Chu Yung Kuan gate at Nank`ou, executed in 1345, and the Buddhist figures in a niche at Lung Tung Ssu near Tsinan-fu in Shantung, executed in 1318, not to speak of minor detached statues, dated at the be ginning of the 14th century.

Ming Period.

When we enter into the Ming period (1368 1643) the dramatic power of expression seems to dry up more and more and the general artistic level is certainly not raised, although the production of Buddhist sculptures goes on with in creasing abundance. Among the most popular and common crea tions of this time may be mentioned, for instance, series of Arhats in iron (good examples of such series are in the museums at Toronto and Gothenburg) which, however, seldom rise above the level of ordinary mass products made according to standard models. Similar motives are also treated in wood and lacquer, sometimes with good decorative effect, though with no more indi vidual characterization. The sculpture of the Ming period is gen erally at its best when it takes up purely realistic motives instead of the traditional hieratic figures. It may thus become quite en joyable in minor representations of mourners, musicians or similar motives, presented without any tendency to archaic restraint which otherwise is so apparent in the plastic arts of the Ming.

Summary.

Trying to sum up the general course of develop ment of Chinese sculpture from the loth to the 15th century in a few words, we have to remember first the comparatively low level of religious sculpture towards the end of the Sung dynasty, particularly after the capital was moved from Kaif eng to Hang chow; secondly, the re-awakening of religious imagery in the northern provinces after the Tartar dynasties had got a firm hold on this part of the country (a flourishing sculptural activity, par ticularly in wood, developed there in the provinces of Chihli and Shansi) ; and thirdly, that with the Yu_ an dynasty a new foreign element appears which perhaps may be called Mongolian and which expresses itself on the one hand in a somewhat dry realism and on the other hand in a whirling linear ornamentation. The religious figures have still some life and expression of their own, though no real spirituality. This development was no longer continued during the Ming period. Whatever creative power may have been left did not turn towards the production of religious sculpture. It is true that a lot of statues, or rather statuettes, in bronze, wood, porcelain and ivory were produced but no great religious works, whether in stone or other materials. The Ming sculptors have given their best in the field of decorative art such as columns, balustrades, and other architectural details, but they created no new types of plastic works, whether religious or secular. They sought their inspiration much more in the imitation of earlier models than in any fresh efforts in the field of sculpture.

(See also SCULPTURE, CHINA, BUDDHA, AND INDIAN AND SIN HALESE ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY, CHINESE ARCHITECTURE.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-E. Chavannes, Mission archeologique dans la Chine septentrionale, 2 albums of plates, 2 vol. text (19°9-15) ; S. Omura, History of Chinese Art; Sculpture, 2 albums of plates, I vol. text in Japanese (1915) ; T. Sekino, Sepulchral Remains of the Han Dynasty in Shantung, I album of plates, text separate in Japanese (192o) ; S. Taketaro and Nakagawa, Rock Carvings from V iin Kang Caves, I album of plates without text (1921) ; S. Tanaka, T'ien Lung Shan, 1 album of plates without text (1923) ; L. Ashton, Introduction to the Study of Chinese Sculpture (1924) ; V. Segalen, "Premier expose des resultats archeologiques dans la Chine occidentale par la mission G. de Voisins, J. Lartigue, V. Segalen," Journal Asiatique, tome vs, vie, vii3 ; O. Siren, Chinese Sculpture from the 5th to the 14th Century, 3 voL plates, I vol. text (1925), and Studien zur Chinesischen Plastik der Post-T'ang Zeit (1927) ; V. Segalen, G. de Voisins and J. Lartigue, Mission Archeologique en Chine, 2 albums of plates without text (1926) ; O. Siren, A History of Early Chinese Art (1929). (O. S.)