Bitong, Brush Pot

This is a Chinese carving of a brush pot (bitong) featuring the Seven Sages, Daoists who obtained supernatural powers and rejected the authority of Confucian teachings and governance. Brush pots were highly valued pieces of interior design meant for the scholar's desk. The concept of the "four treasures" (inkstone, ink, brush, and paper) of a scholar's study became an appreciated facet of interior design during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Additional desk items which were appreciated for their function and beauty included brush pots, wrist rests, scroll pots, and desk screens. This pot is constructed of bamboo, a revered material for Chinese arts due to its ability to flourish throughout winter and its resultant association with longevity. This item is signed Mo Shan Zhi, one of the synonyms for the artist Chou Nai-shih.

The Spurlock museum holds a variety of Chinese lacquer figures created during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and they serve as representations of regional beliefs and ethics, cultural figureheads, and the human condition. Common muses included famed scholars and poets, arhats (Buddhist holy men), bodhisattvas (Buddhists who have achieved enlightenment but choose to remain in the world to help others end their suffering), deities of East Asian belief structures, and the Chinese zodiac. Animals, plants, and other natural objects were also carved and are typically associated with good fortune and other favorable life conditions.

The carving technique of Chinese lacquer, due to the complicated drying process, was not perfected until relatively late in history. The raw lacquer sap taken from the rhus tree species, particularly Rhus verniciflua, would not harden if applied too thickly, which meant that lacquer painting required a lengthy layering technique. Carved items of the commonly-used red lacquer style (ti hong) were not created until the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), and the lacquer manufacturing procedures are recorded for both the Yuan and early Ming periods. A wooden base was covered with a thick layer of black lacquer (mixed with ash to promote hardening) which served as a smooth surface for the additional layers. A mixture of red and yellow layers, usually between 100 to 200, were then applied, and the artist then carved into these layers to produce a desired design. In order to indicate when the artist had to stop carving, several black layers would have been added as markers at an earlier point of the layering process.

Lacquerware was typically produced in government-sponsored workshops, though this was not always the case. In times of economic prosperity, the commercial workshops of southern China, particularly the southeastern provinces of the Song and Yuan periods (13th-14th century) and the late Ming era, were innovative in their approaches to creating lacquer items. Lacquer items from the Qing palace workshops were, at first, carved by craftsmen capable of overcoming the difficulties of lacquer carving due to their experience carving bamboo and ivory. However, the rapid political and economic decline of the Qing Dynasty following the reign of Qianlong (1735-1796) resulted in the closing down of many palace workshops, and the lacquer items made afterwards were fewer and had diminished in quality.

Cameron, Nigel. The Chinese Scholar's Desk. Hong Kong: FormAsia Books, 2003.

Hutt, Julia. Understanding Far Eastern Art: A Complete Guide to the Arts of China, Japan and Korea - Ceramics, Sculpture, Painting, Prints, Lacquer, Textiles and Metalwork. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987.

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. Sculpted Stories: Selected Works from the Fred Freund Collection. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, n.d.

Watt, James C. Y., and Barbara Brennan Ford. East Asian Lacquer: The Florence and Herbert Irving Collection. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.