Jay Xu Director of the Asian Art Museum, and former director of the Seattle Art Museum, spoke to us, about "rusty" scholarship, which he is taking up, again, on material culture in the Sichuan Basin. He studied under the great scholar, Robert Bagley, at Princeton University, where he spent 15 years earning his Phd under Wang Feng. His dissertation focused on Sanxingdui. His feeling is that not much scholarship has been done since 1986. It appears he needs to update himself on publications in China. I saw a great exhibition of relics from Sanxingdui in a wonderful new museum outside Hangzhou. This summer I visited both Sangingdui and Jinsha, and they were, as they are, for many Chinese, as memorable as the tombs of the burial pits of the warriors in Xian. I have posted my photos from these museums on MSN Sky Drive..
Dr. Xu gave a very interesting lecture, following the motif of birds on the bronzes and showed how articles of this period which show these birds are of a type. The stylized birds sometimes replace dragons in the register on the Sanxingdui bronzes. He did not have a response when I raised the question about the birds found in the bronze "holy" trees, but only commented they were difficult to study, because they had been difficult to assemble due to being burnt and broken. However, the tree is among those "sculptures" which he points out in this lecture, as representing a new stage, other than having bronzes of a functional or ritual nature, such as the drinking vessels.
It was interesting to see his naturalistic slides of the World Heritage setting, including the Irrigation Ditch which I also viewed this summer. Achieving this status, because it was one of the earliest examples in China of man changing the course of rivers through controls, to counter floods on this plain. It was ironic that the week after my visit, there was a flood in this region.
The statue which formed one of his main points but raised questions of "association" or "meaning in that cultural setting" is this free standing more than six ft high sculpture, a departure from the functional bronzes traditionally represented in rituals. He proposes that possibly the man was holding an elephant tusk. He does not seem to concur with the previous evidence representing this man as a "presiding" priest for the altar ceremonies, which is what is represented at the Sanxingdui museum site.
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Dr. Xu gave a very interesting lecture, following the motif of birds on the bronzes and showed how articles of this period which show these birds are of a type. The stylized birds sometimes replace dragons in the register on the Sanxingdui bronzes. He did not have a response when I raised the question about the birds found in the bronze "holy" trees, but only commented they were difficult to study, because they had been difficult to assemble due to being burnt and broken. However, the tree is among those "sculptures" which he points out in this lecture, as representing a new stage, other than having bronzes of a functional or ritual nature, such as the drinking vessels.
It was interesting to see his naturalistic slides of the World Heritage setting, including the Irrigation Ditch which I also viewed this summer. Achieving this status, because it was one of the earliest examples in China of man changing the course of rivers through controls, to counter floods on this plain. It was ironic that the week after my visit, there was a flood in this region.
The statue which formed one of his main points but raised questions of "association" or "meaning in that cultural setting" is this free standing more than six ft high sculpture, a departure from the functional bronzes traditionally represented in rituals. He proposes that possibly the man was holding an elephant tusk. He does not seem to concur with the previous evidence representing this man as a "presiding" priest for the altar ceremonies, which is what is represented at the Sanxingdui museum site.
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