3rd Saturday Lecture: The Beauty and Danger of Chinese Lacquer

good morning my name is russell lowe it is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you our first speaker professor raymond menegos ray served as a professor in the department of mathematics at san diego state university for 11 years upon his retirement 20 years ago to our benefit ray returned to his first love drawing painting and sculpture he has been a docent for san diego san diego museum of art where our own lily birmingham was one of his instructors now rey characterizes himself as a student of art history but ray is not satisfied with simply admiring art his interest in art history is focused more on the questions of how a work of art is produced he delves deeply into the processes and ancient techniques that go into creating these beautiful pieces now to understand how works of art and lacquer are made ray set out to learn the process of making lacquer art and then remarkably he applied these techniques to produce his very own carved lacquer box today ray will share with us his expertise describing the path of this incredibly creative journey ray rave anneal yourself thank you russ that was a beautiful introduction and i'm really humbled uh by being here because i understand very well that there are many people in this room that know more about chinese lacquer than i do uh so i am an amateur at this and my hope and my goal this morning is that through my efforts at making chinese carve lacquer box and then trying to do inlay with mother of pearl and abalone you will appreciate not only the beauty the danger that the artists faced in making these works but also the beauty of the materials and just the effort and the creativity of the artists when you see my meager attempts you will gain an understanding and hopefully an appreciation of the works made by these wonderful chinese artists so this morning we will look at a carved lacquer and the process by which the lacquer was made and then the second part will be on mother of pearl inlay along the way i will show you some beautiful pieces of art but my attempt is not to give you the history of the art but to again to focus on how these objects were made so on your screen you can see a chinese carved lacquer box and as russ said when i was studying uh the works of china under the direction of lily b i saw a work much like this and as we were in the gallery looking at a scene of a literati of the scholar being attended by two attendants in this pavilion we learned a lot about the song dynasty and the work of art at that time but as the class separated i started looking more carefully at the box because my interest is in the materials and how things are made and so we started reading about this and people said that this is not what carved wood this is actually a wooden box with many many layers of lacquer built up onto the surface and then after the surface had built up to a thickness of about three to five millimeters which you can see casts these deep shadows uh giving you an indication of the thickness of the lacquer then the artist set themselves the task of carving these beautiful images onto the surface of the lacquer and so i needed to know how this was done and so this was the inspiration uh for my attempt to understand chinese card lacquer so what is lacquer in china there are there's a species of a sumac tree called roos venezuela and it grows native to china and here you have a image of what that tree looks like the trees take about 10 years to grow before these the the sap the sumac can be harvested between june and september while the flowers are on the trees the the gardeners can slice slices into the tree and you can see starting at the bottom as the summer proceeds they're slicing more and more slices and collecting very little sap from each from each slice by the end of the summer and beginning of the fall the result of all this is that the trees end up dying as the white milky sap is collected the sap is stored in a cool environment and uh but not all is lost with the trees uh six or seven saplings grow up from the roots of the trees so that later in a few more years the harvest can continue so the the sap is stored in a cool environment but then when it's ready to be used it is heated and filtered before it can be applied to a surface now what's the danger of this the danger is that much like the poison oak that we have in our in our canyons here this is a very poisonous to the skin creating lumps and welts on the skin and also if you breathe it for an extended period of time it can cause respiratory disease so there is uh there is a danger to working with the lacquer the artisans in china can build up a tolerance to it but it's still a severely dangerous material now in in uh in ancient times they would use three different materials to pigment the lacquer so carbon uh which is soot it comes from the imperfect combustion of woody material can be used to give and create a black lacquer it's also the same material that was used in the black ink that was used in calligraphy and in paintings the the second material that was used and probably the more important was cinnabar cinnabar and here we see a picture of the ore that you could get out of the ground and china had vast deposits of cinnabar and if this was ground and purified the red powder could be used to give the beautiful red color which was very important to the chinese people at the time and still probably the most important color coincidental with the ming dynasty in in the east we had the renaissance in europe and rome considered cinnabar to be the most uh which is vermilion the most beautiful and expensive color it was controlled by the roman government at the time and so the market was was very prized here we see uh crystals of cinnabar which is also a very poisonous substance it's mercury sulfide it was so uh it is so dangerous that uh the very famous isaac newton who used to do a lot of studies with mercury went crazy for a period of few years and so again the artists would subject themselves to the dangers of working with mercuric sulfide and here we see it in its powdered form the third pigment that was used not as extensively is orpament which gave a lacquer a yellow color and here again we see the uh the ore version of the pigment but it also crystallized in certain veins and so you can see the beautiful yellow color of this of this material uh orpament is arsenic sulfide and you don't have to know very much to know that how hazardous working is with arsenic so we know a little bit about the dangers of the sumac and the pigments that were used to give colors but how was uh the the works achieved how do we actually carve lacquer so i i did not have the resources to fly to china to uh acquire a wooden box so instead i went to michael's and i bought a little small wooden box probably made in china and i went to the art store in hillcrest and i was able to purchase cadmium red pigment which is close in color to vermilion close in color to the cinnabar it's a little redder cinnabar is a little more towards the orange and some bone black or carbon black pigments uh we don't have available chinese sumac here so i went to home depot and got a synthetic uh lacquer i knew i would need a brush and something to carve the lacquer with now before an artist starts the process the artist has to know what he's going to attempt to do and so i had seen enough uh carved lacquer boxes and and trays and things to know that i wanted to start by applying a few layers of black lacquer before i applied layers of red lacquer my attempt was to carve down through the the red to expose the black lacquer underneath but immediately i encountered a problem it's very difficult to find any of the actual techniques that the chinese artist used as mr liu has taught me many of these techniques were involved in a family and the family guarded the secrets very well and so what i did was i put some of my carbon uh pigment into the sumac not knowing the concentrations or the proportions and then i brushed it onto the to the wood and to my disappointment all these little bumps were on the wood surface so i knew something was wrong and so i had in my kitchen a small mortar and pestle and so what i had to do was grind the carbon to even finer so that the particles could suspend themselves in the sumac or in the lacquer without creating little bumps so after some effort and experimentation i finally got a proportions and the and the fineness of the grain so that i could achieve a beautifully smooth surface on on the wood now lacquer has this incredible property of drying very slowly and as it dries slowly it comes to a perfectly flat surface under gravity in other words you could with a very coarse brush apply the lacquer such that you could see the all the brush work but the lacquer itself would simply smooth itself out over time now in china the chinese sumac does not air dry it's a chemical reaction that needs to happen at a precise high temperature and high humidity because that's not drying that's actually a chemical reaction by which the the liquid sumac turns into a plastic it is the original organic plastic and uh so it was a very prized material the the material itself is uh tolerates acids water and it's it's a beautiful and very resilient material well after applying about seven layers of lacquer to the surface i started applying the red lacquer uh i had the good fortune that the red already came in fine enough particles i didn't have to grind it much but i still ground it in my mortar and pestle with the lacquer and you can see that even after the first applications you could see through the translucency of the material to the black that's still underneath and i kept going and after working for five months this is where i ended up by this point i knew that i was only going to carve the surface or of the top of the of the lacquer box and so i didn't apply as many layers to the sides of the box as i did to the top there are 250 layers of lacquer on this surface and i hope you can appreciate that each layer uh with real sumac takes a week to dry before you can apply the next so it would take the chinese artists years sometimes a year or two or more to actually build up the lacquer to a sufficient thickness so that it could be carved well i wish i could see all your faces but at this point i was now scared why am i scared because i had to apply a knife to this and what was i going to carve and was i able to achieve anything well i knew i couldn't attempt the literati pavilion scene that was so beautiful at the beginning and so i decided to look around for some images and i ended up trying to carve a longevity symbol on the top of it now please look at this carefully it's a terrible carving job i mean if you compare this to any of the chinese lacquer boxes that you see you can see how difficult it is to achieve what they were able to do lacquer yields itself to a knife very easily when i first put my exacto blade into the surface i wanted to carve down to the black but it yields so well it carves so beautifully that i went all the way through the red all the way through the black right down to the wood and i was really sad and disappointed and so i had to very carefully uh carve this out by hand it's hard to see maybe but the thickness of the red lacquer is three millimeters and uh you can see and hopefully appreciate the skill and the craftsmanship of the chinese artists that were able to to uh do the works that i'm now going to show you so here carve lacquer started in the southern song and here we have an early example of carved lacquer and this is the cinnabar red and you can see all the way through to the wood so the artists did not apply a layer of black black or under and they carved all the way down to the wood what's also important about this work is you see a very ubiquitous motif namely the two pheasants or two phoenix birds that are that are represented in chinese art very often here we have a also a song carved box the importance of this one for me was that it actually has the three different pigments the red the yellow and the black although i don't really see in this photograph the red pigment so much it might be that i'm looking at a a uh well it's called the three colored pigment so it had to be red at this time period here's another example of a motif that's carved into a t-bowl which is called a sword pommel which is also a very uh a motif that is seen very often in in carve lacquer and then you can see the the stability of the images and of the forms in china where again we're at the yuan dynasty and you can see again the two bird motif carved into the black lacquer now if i am at a antiques road show or at a garage sale or maybe a katherine jones home rummaging around in her attic i would be looking for an example of carved lacquer now to identify it can you see all these little cracks and imperfections in the lacquer just about every work of art that i've seen from from the song dynasty through the ming dynasties all have these slight imperfections because as it as the lacquer uh is subjected to the elements and oxidation uh these cracks appear in other words if i don't see those cracks i know that it's a recent production and it wouldn't be an original again the images that are carved and the way the images are carved also tell us something about the period but andy can tell us more about that in his portion of the talk and here is a wonderful example from the ming dynasty and uh scholars attribute uh the ming dynasty to the absolute pinnacle of carve lacquer in in china this is the the work of art that we have at our museum the san diego museum of art that inspired my little carved lacquer box so i cannot read the symbols but on the very top of this of the box is the symbol of longevity that i chose for my little box but i'm also told that all these other uh calligraphic symbols or are also different variations of the word longevity can see how the artist carved through the red down to the black lacquer and then all the different little geometric forms that they were able to achieve in the lacquer i'm reminded of a movie amadeus that i saw many many years ago amadeus is about the relationship between mozart and uh salieri an italian composer salieri was a talented court composer in in vienna but mozart was a genius one day salieri goes into mozart's home and he's able to find some music sheets that mozart had read and as he saw the genius that was on the pages he almost fainted and the music dropped out of his hand why do i say that because when i look at a work of art a chinese lacquer box i almost faint because i understand the level of artistry and craftsmanship and effort that goes into producing something like this and i know that i could never do it and so i i feel like salieri when i see works of art like this here we have a qing dynasty bowl with some beautifully carved again these images are carved in through the red lacquer into the red into the black and i'm told that this represents a poem here is a carved lacquer box that you have in your collection and uh it might have it's i'm not sure what the size is because i haven't seen it personally but it might some carve lacquer boxes are used to keep prized utensils maybe pens and things like that and i'm showing you this one that i found on the internet because it's an example of multi-layers of colors you see the yellow the red and the black each line that you see carved into the box represents many many layers of lacquer and so here you have again probably a couple hundred layers of lacquer of different colors built up onto the box before the artist begins uh carving onto the surface of the box uh and furniture was also uh carved i would imagine that something like this involves a workshop of people because as i look at the details of each of these benches i can see that they are not the same so i would i would venture to say that different individual artists were involved with carving each of the benches and the table top that you see and here's another fine example from the victoria and albert museum in in london so in addition to carving on wood uh not as many but many carved lacquer were also achieved on copper alloys like brass here's an example from your collection of a snuff bottle and uh the impressive thing of this is that you have a brass bottle the lacquer is built up on the surface of the bottle and the artist has to have an image that goes all the way around the bottle and then and ends right where it begins in other words the entire image has to be thought out very carefully before the carving begins this is another small carve lacquer on brass in your collection the impressive thing about this is before the lacquer was applied the brass had to be formed and then inside it has a beautifully blue enamel surface enamel is a combination of a colored pigment and glass which had to be fired in a kiln so that it would all melt smoothly onto the surface and all of that had to take place before the lacquer was applied and carved and probably um one of the finest examples again from the london museum is this uh vaz this is two sides of the vas it's only one vaz and again the image has to unite with itself as you go all the way around it so the next technique i want to address is inlay of mother of pearl there are two basic techniques one is dry and one is wet and i will speak principally about the dry technique about a two weeks ago i was the the museum shared with me the images that mr liu is going to show us and in his collection he has some very fine mother of pearl inlay so here we see a top of a box with probably mother of pearl and abalone shells inlaid onto the surface so last weekend i said to myself hmm i need to do this for me for myself also how is this achieved and so i set myself the task of trying to create an inlay now i want you to note before i go on every little speck that you see this little bud these little these little limbs little petals of the flower these little triangular decorations on the side each of those have been sawn off of either a mother-of-pearl shell an oyster shell or the green here might be an abalone shell or perhaps some other kind of mollusk or sea snail or sea shell every single part is hand sewn with a saw so what what is mother of pearl oyster shells uh the oyster secretes a whoops the oyster secretes a material that is called naker n-a-c-r-e and that material coats the interior of the oyster shell and as the shell grows it keeps secreting this material if an impurity gets into the oyster the the oyster tries to cover that impurity and that eventually turns into a pearl so mother of pearl is the shell that gives rise to the pearl and that material is maker it is a beautiful iridescent material and it is prized to create the decorations that are inlay here is a blow up of an abalone shell and you can see the beautiful colors and the layers that are deposited on the surface of the abalone shell and is this is what has attracted uh the artists to the inlay techniques so naker here on the right i have an electron microscope photograph of the material and you can see that these layers are mostly calcium carbonate calcium carbonate you can take it's chalk if you draw on a board with white chalk but here it's in a form of layers on the left i have a cartoon and in between the layers there's an organic material it is a polymer of sugars called kitten that suspends one layer above the other so it's a combination of inorganic minerals with organic materials that are all created by the oyster shell now one thing i didn't know until mr liu explained to me uh and he will give us some more insight is that i knew that that the chinese artists of the past somehow were able to take the thick shells and separate the layers apart and he'll describe that in more detail but the the reason uh the abalone and the mother of pearl give us these beautiful colors is that the light that comes down and reflects off of different planes creates the interference of the light that creates all the beautiful colors that is that you see it's much like if you were to try to wash off gasoline or oil on your driveway from water the thin layer of oil creates this interference patterns of colors uh like also the the color in the hummingbirds feathers are all created by the way light scatters and interferes through different layers of the material and so i happen to have an abalone shell in my garage i didn't have a mother of pearl and so i set myself the task of i have a fret saw now this is not the kind that the chinese use they use more of a of a circular saw that looked like a bow but the beauty of this saw is that the blade can be removed from the armature and you drill a small hole through the shell you then assemble the saw through the shell and then you set yourself the task of carving out or sawing out all of the different forms with with this fret saw or bow saw so the first thing i did was i wanted to cut off a piece of the abalone with my fret saw and you can see how i've released the small portion of it now that shell is fairly thick i think that shell is about an eighth of an inch thick and it's pretty hard a couple of weeks ago catherine jones had given you a lecture on jade jade is so hard it cannot be cut with with uh with a saw or a knife but abalone in comparison is you can cut with a saw on a mohs scale it's about a 3.5 jade is a 6.5 and diamond is a 10 but i understood that i needed to be able to cut thin layers of it and i wasn't able to do it with a hand saw i tried doing it with a dremel drill and when i did the fumes that it released were the most awful smelling substance i'd ever smell in my life i would assume that the organic material that that binds the calcium carbonate layers created this incredibly horrible smell that even with my n95 mask it penetrated through the mask and so i gave up so in the dry technique what one does is again you imagine the entire image and you cut out all of the little shapes that you're going to need you apply the shape to the wood and then you carefully outline it on your on your wooden board now if you were a good uh student in kindergarten and you had your drawing book remember you had to draw with inside the lines and paint inside the lines that is even more true in inlay you now have to set yourself the task of carving perfectly inside the line you cannot touch the line when you're carving modern artists use uh uh i've forgotten the word anyway modern artists use the different tools but the ancient chinese only had knives and and chisels to do it with so i set i got my knife and chisel set and i started carving out the pocket that would hold the inlay and eventually when i got the depth enough i applied the abalone shell to it and i want you to see how poor of a job i did because a true inlay you could not actually see this rough ugly boundary that i did that that again gives me an impression of the skill level of the artists now again my abalone was much thicker than they would have but when i finished i i lacquered it and that's the process of dry inlay so the effort it took me to apply one piece gives me again an understanding of the incredible labor that goes into creating the beautiful works of art like this one here we see a ming dini ming dynasty uh box with literally hundreds of pieces of of shell very thin shell that have been laid in into the uh into the top and in this case not only do we have abalone and mother of pearl but also there is gold inlay into this tray that we see here the other techniques that are used with lacquer are lacquer over carved wood wood doesn't yield itself to the knife as easily as lacquer so even though the artist here was able to carve these images into the wood this is uh the lacquer is then applied over the top this is a work of art that's in in your collection and here's another work from your museum uh a piece of furniture with the carved i believe this is rosewood which is a prized wood and uh and then the lacquer is applied over the top again the lacquer seals the wood it makes it impervious to acids and water and it's a really important uh material and the last technique i just wanted to show you briefly is there are some painted images over lacquer some of the earliest use of lacquer goes all the way back to the han dynasty and here we see black and red lacquer on a bowl on a wooden bowl and here we see oil paint the lacquer would be first applied to the to the tray then the the painting would be executed on top of it and then the clear lacquer would go over the top to seal it here's an example from your collection i believe and on these slides i have some some uh if they're available to you some extra terms and words and there's a bibliography with two videos if you wanted to see videos of these techniques demonstrated so with that i will unshare my screen ray this is russell logan that was absolutely fascinating i appreciate that and thank you for your expertise you know as someone who really enjoys creating and making objects i just i'm fascinated by what you learned and what you're able to execute so many questions but maybe we can hold off on some of those until after the presentation but thank you so very very much you're welcome thank you ray now it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you mr andy lou his chinese name is lupin he has been a collector of chinese antiquities he is an ambassador for chinese heritage we are fortunate enough that he is willing to showcase some of the items in his massive collection the items of the precious lacquer ray has given you a beautiful presentation on how he made his humble little box of longevity how he carved into the abalone shell to make an inlay now let's open our eyes and give a warm welcome to mr andy lou andy it's all yours thank you thank you already and also thanks to raise a presentation i really appreciate it he likes to do the research on chinese art i really appreciate it but first of all high pressure only things introduce a locker culture for everybody occur in chinese art or culture history is another shining chapter the first one i show is picture it's culture which is a cc provided for me this locker we find around the six to seven thousand years ago at the other side beside we find this one and also we find a lot of seeds so in in other words in that time they know how to make the rice ball and they also know how to plant the rice so it's amazing and this is a class one protection object but you cannot see this one outside the country you know let me go out to exhibition okay let's go this is not my collection okay this style my collections okay this is the han dynasty uh the painting on the locker thinking so you can see these things is called a three has phoenix and uh because that means i researched something you know maybe it's a lucky bird you know and this one is repaired have been uh repaired uh quite a bit the other one is uh two phoenix in the center that one is a little a few repairing you know and uh i'm glad i have these things and uh in my collections and the next i'll show you what is this three verse three has physic means here you go next okay so this is uh refining true wong hwang who culture through culture in china very very famous and saying top in that time they start so many stops you know we we we see they know that a lot of music around the instrument it's all coming from that time you know i talked about a famous sen seung ho is the guy's name and uh his tune we find and he got the coffin in the beautiful locker pictures really really nice also he got a three layer for the coffin the first one is a stone the second one is la curve and in all these the beautiful pictures the inside the cereal one for his body it painted north star was very interested in that time they already researched meteorologists because it applied for the fight or something you know you know the weather is very important and these keys these things i show you these aren't the silk rope you know this they saw in my armor so i took these pictures uh this is a specifying for me you know if i hope to me so this this three has a phoenix so you can see more detail on this one because uh my collection i'm not a good photographer so another really good pictures okay let's go next okay this is a locker screen this screen is pretty big it's about about eight pieces and you can see i have this stem on the shanghai art and the design research center i wrote that letter to the shanghai museum i tried to find out his screen because his screen is a very very nice amazing screen because they wrote back to me he told me some story they say this is shanghai art and design research center is after the qing dynasty and a lot of these people used to work for the college and they lost job they don't have job anymore so they're going out maybe these kind of things might be give to their children or something they organize this uh research center because they want you know to do something to get paid you know so that's that they say that time this is the top like craftsman there's a dude there's a screen unfortunately i have this screen i have experience around 20 plus years ago and the guy called me is his uncle is a navy captain the queen of their ship called in singapore 50 years ago where his uncle already screamed after his uncle passed away so he inherited he said the screen's so big and he don't have any play support so he he keeping garage so he's pretty fails in the third car you know the painting on that lucky is the another oil base very water-based so i can clean them up and also in the last image so i find a furniture store the guys will repair roughly repair a little bit and also you know the you can see this detail this screen we use the carrying scale but this carving is a different regular there's a string carving down because he got so many layers in there so you want to show the color so this scratched the locker until he satisfied the real color he one so you can't see this one you can see here's a rope the green and she would approach something under if you see the detail you know you scratch them the group that the blues come up you know and also this uh it's the uh the chinese said it's a whole tree there's a good story about him and he's the one he he he shoot you know because in china this is the early times thousand thousand years ago we have ten sons so there's no line the people are so hot and so so suffered you know so this guy coming he uses a arrow and a ball and shoots a nice size down it's only got one left it's today's slime this is a story the nice story so you can see from his uh weapon you know he kind of wind his of this ball on the top you know that's very interesting okay let's go next okay this is the whole screen and these screens not only the very good craftsman and also the topic is really great this is yogurto this means it's the first chinese religions picture because these nine of them all the god you can see all of most of them are staying on the tower that means they are the gods they are not regular people they are not another war you know in that time you have a religion a belief what is there you know say mexico to church they don't have a church so they eventually got some temples you know for these things so underneath that the red one that means is dragon symbolic dragons you know and also i haven't mentioned this you know this uh technique you're gonna use on the painting i think a lot of people went to uh xi'an to see the terracotta soldier you know that all character soldier originally is very colorful after they off the ground they change the color and actually how they can paint the color on the color is very hard if you have the if i have some high density stuff i know follow will fade away so the all the seven thousand tegan soldier in the xi'an you have a very thin laker on it so you can see some of them repealed you know they put a locker first let them dry and put a collar on that's why you can keep a long long time you know like keep a couple thousand years something like that you know and also you know this technique carving these uh scream these things european people really like it you know you can see laline of the high-end french furniture the inlay that is peace this locker having in their furniture because because this is very expensive processing so just really talk about you know the beauty and the dangers because this locker is is very poison european people say we move these things from china in that time 17 17 18th century you know the one void takes them about at least four to five months if lucky can make the voice some of them are sunk in the in the ocean you know around your color area so they try to plant the locker tree so they're smart they they bought the thousands of locker tree to try to play in europe then they can do it himself you know they don't need it through all these guys you know traveling but then they find out the locker juice is very poison just like a ray say you know they make itches and as they they rotten your skin start rotten and you cannot breathe in besides that all the lacquer trees die because he got some kind insects like these locker trees so that's a word called the ecosystem so they give up so they say okay we still import from china this thing just like you know the two years tried to plan the robber tree from border robbery from the indonesia malaysia and moved to brazil a sensing they never can make it okay let's go next okay these collections uh england the the box you know the they use the brawn locker and the english this thing this is around the uh ram dynasty because he like these guys you look like you know the snowflake you know uh i don't think it's easy no that's a snowflake it was look like that time are they imagination you know because like a flower or the ball because it's a wrong line you know and it's it's a real nice it's amazing in the sun bears longevity that they call the longevity this ball is pretty big i think it's around 20 25 inches diameter and let's go next okay this is a in the end of the qin dynasty and the you know time the people very popular they use the locker england is locker for the rich families they use these things you know and the wines uh we call it you know the wedding basket and they all you know there's a mother pearl so and then the wine is a double happiness so in other kinds of writing proper happiness is a very long you know they call it joe johns you know and uh just like say you know they're they're very popular and the but still is very expensive in that place and then let's go next now you can see we open a box that uh you can see inside you know dividing you can pour the candy in there because you know wedding basket you know you can put a candy in there or something like that you know you go to the ceremony you know after ceremony you can open everybody can have candy something like that on the left side i think it's a sewing box you see the two phoenix are wrong as sun usually in chinese simple phoenix indicate is a female dragon indicate male that's why i think this problem is a sewing box that's why you got two feelings on it you know it's real nice and um a lot of work just like everything yes you saw the razor work you know this is a lot of work okay let's go next okay this is a mint dynasty i find this uh these things around 15 18 years ago you know it's actually cell it is around the on the corner because i broke a leak and i know this is a mean catalyst so i bought them and i fixed i find the furniture fixed for me and it's a real nice you can see in that time the mean honestly they're working you know and there's so many you know the small things and as these kids they use the technique they pop you some sea snails share the the inlaid the the the skin i would like friendly related on this one okay let's go next okay this is a little box let me show you before the color is called that you know that she she uh she contact tc that means you know translated to the the real chinese words is carving renal cavity what do you call it renal cavity that's a a long story you know because in the warrior state the people like the reno's philippines the pillow button usually after that the renault died of the pillow bottle look like this usually carve them circle they like a decoration for the for the oil or something on the on there you know the pale that's why they call it you know the peach that means is uh the renault carbon then you can see all the layers just like a ray say you know every layer you take a long long time to let them dry out by the way you know in chinese i went to the to visit a locker manufacturer you know in in china we are visiting there they say that this locker every layer they do it they pull in the basement pipe you know and they also spread water in there give it a very high humidity but avoid the crack that's why i take a long time for the 200 at least 200 or 250 layers to able to target okay let's go next this is a snap bottle it's in that time you know the snowball usb is from the europe in the middle of the min dynasty from the uh the original is putting the box of the tobacco box it's mobile is real nice and the chinese then changed it too big you know so they developed this uh snuffbox but uh it's not bad and a later time so that the rich people they try to show the people they're different across the business they show you the snap what are you guys you know your gala is uh occurs i got as a gold you got is a j or you have some kind of other stuff or the whole you know the the formula of your the whole and also you got something you know like porcelain some person is really real nice this is it's very very hard to make that even smaller and also they got a mostaka is the grass they call the layout sheet the last one you know the great things were inside the paint and that inside paint would take a long long time to achieve one and some of them is a famous artist that that bottle always cause really really expensive for today we got about three or four famous uh inside painting by the staff adults it's very hard to find the real ones you know okay let's go next okay this car this this boxes i believe is grand dynasty or early mean because you can see from here carving that time the carving that's like a ray show you a song dynasty that's even earlier this kind of box don't have the base they don't have the base carbon you simply have the flower as it's in the carving and you can see compared this way and the sun dynasty is different from dynasty usually you can see a lot of pages you can see the wood or something i love but in korean dynasty from there there there we call it another cobalt blue vase when they're painting they are full you know they don't have too many space and they're in the porcelain the entire is a porcelain they're probably like powering them all at the pictures okay they don't have any base carving and uh this is a great piece i think you know because i like it because of the whole things you know and uh and you can you can different other copy you know like a current scenes or something like that okay let's go next okay this is my collection this is a the qing dynasties they imitate the runs you know the bronze is in chinese art is the most important position in chinese art because a lot of them based on the bronze pedophiles is not only art only owned by the emperor or the law they use it for the ceremony and and also a lot of bronze have [Music] letter on it they tell us a lot of story so the bronze is a very very important position in the chinese art so later on you know like a song dynasty they imitate a lot of their their positive based on the bronze and this one is based on the bronze thing we call it this is real nice and you can see from his carving now they're having the basic harvey now is it like a squirt you know so we can identify this is uh in dynasties because like a ming dynasty is a little bit different it's like a refined longer one so this is another story because they have a book talk about these things very complicated you can tell for a year what well you guys that's like the time for you and let's go next okay this is a middle of the qing dynasty so this one's different i show you the first one the screen so this one is a carving after the carving they just put a color in there like painting use the brush to pin the color inside the the the car so you can see it's very shallow you know and you can see the colors are very even this techniques difference the first one i show you that is very very hard because you have to scratch the color show the another layer color and mix them together before you you do it you have to have a plan what can color layer by layer together you know okay let's go to the next okay these are my best collections and you see is a very beautiful one this is a come from the sea snail you got a special sea snails very colorful and uh in that time it's almost uh they say the late the chin in that time even a lot of times very rare these are only few craftsmen know how to do it because he used some kinds water mix something with soft sea snail look at one kind of seeds now inside is very powerful i never saw the seasonal palace this is the port of you know i never saw the regular season these are very colorful and they take the inside the skin out that's a great difficulty yeah and also this is uh always the family secret so nobody else know how to do these things i always do this and they always approach the door you know because they say they're soaking their problem before days until you can walk ball they take this very very thin layer out then cut a piece and pull out this is a snap bottle the end of the head you can take them out now the thickest you know the secret the head that's the the top you can open and these these things is uh very very rare i don't see this on too many and the ratio has a lot of liquor presentation the garden c you can we got some gold leaf in there that picture i think the rest is a sea snail also look it's very colorful it's different than regular mother pearl and these things you know the just like a loss of art you know and even the screen i don't see i never saw that one later i never saw the other person that kind of stopped anymore you know probably the one another loss of heart but we need to raise these people you know research and find out what the heck it is you know so okay and this is my last one and uh thank you very much and uh if you got any questions you can ask a lady thank you so much andy uh i just want to comment that uh i am sure some of the techniques are lost already to think about how to get the shell of the sea snail to become thin membrane to be put as inlay onto that snot bottle that you just showed must be something so fantastic the secrets are probably not uh being passed down from generation to generation so we have some lost arts you also mentioned that in the terra cotta soldiers that lacquer was used as a protective layer before the colors were put on so i am sure we will get beautiful comments and questions later on but at this point in time before i invite ross to join me and rey and you we will ask elizabeth elizabeth to come and do a short short very short survey elizabeth please okay great great we are going to go ahead and launch a poll um okay we will wait for about two minutes wow too bad there's only one option to choose in the poll i think that's one of the i guess drop drawbacks about the zoom pole it's a multiple choice one option only and that's that's the down part because there's a couple in the first question that i would say more than one issue yeah yeah it is uh i do appreciate your comments please send us an email detailing these comments we aim to improve continuously always we want to learn from you and i want to thank you so much you all do a beautiful job thank you thank you we want to do better always we spend hours and hours behind the scene trying to make it user friendly trying to make it interesting so all your comments negative or positive are deeply deeply appreciated thank you okay great it seems like we are have finalized the poll and we can move on to q a i can remember seeing in the screen i think you lowered your hand sharon but you had a question um i think sort of at some point in andy's presentation would you like to post your question now yes i i do have a question um and i would like to thank both speakers because i thought they were both interesting you both shared a lot of information so really i really appreciate these series that the chinese museum is doing i totally enjoy them um i have a question for ray ray is you keep mentioning the san diego museum of art which i totally appreciate are they doing anything where there's an audio play when you go by these things because i have seen chinese lacquer before never knew all the intricacies involved so it'd be nice to be able to have like a little app where you could push on something to get more information about how it's created or are you thinking of taking that as a business opportunity or whatever thanks uh yeah thanks for your comment we do have app available for some works of art but not all but uh i will share your particular interest with uh the curators and the people in charge so that maybe we can do a better job of getting more apps in the in the chinese uh galleries including a video with it because i i i i enjoyed looking at the little video of his as well to see how it was done and how the colors bleed through so thank you okay thank you for your question wonderful elizabeth i do not see any hands raised in zoom so let me look and see if i can find any hands for people who have video but most people have their video turned off i've seen a number of comments in the chat box um i think so thankful for for all of the fascinating information hopefully um i can catch up on your presentations thank you two for your wonderful presentations so a lot of i guess positive comments um karen then just i guess chimed in to say thanks to two wonderful presenters speakers and organizers very educational i am still looking around for raised hands whether people are doing it with their camera on or they have done the zoom hand well russ would you like to speak well i i was absolutely fascinated by both presentations and ray i have a question for you as a mathematician was there math or geometry involved in some of those circular designs because as you pointed out these designs have to match perfectly as they got around 360 degrees to the side so how did they accomplish that so yeah so they had to actually work out the details uh before they began and i think that's true of all great art except maybe some modern art where it's sort of a random process you know stream of consciousness but most great art whether in the east or the west it all began with a complete conception of the final product before they started and uh you know even in quantum mechanics if you're thinking of of the atom and the wave function of the atom uh the wave function has to match perfectly as you come all the way around 360 degrees so certainly the artist especially of those geometric designs on the snuff bottles uh would have had to work that out in some detail before they even began so that's what do you do you think it was done on paper of some type and then maybe transferred to the three-dimensional object i think the way i tried to do it was exactly that i drew the longevity symbol in paper and then i tried to transfer it to the top before i began carving but even that was very difficult the paper would move it would slide and there were but i think a skilled artist uh that had many years of experience and were mentored by their father and their grandfather would have developed a more instinctive way of doing it than the way i did are there still people in china today artisans who uh continue this creative process as of 10 years ago there were only 20. wow so i don't know the most recent number so it's it's really like andy said uh becoming a lost art that's amazing uh this is tom lee many years ago i i was at an exhibit in toronto in the museum there there was a male lady who's doing batik so it's the wax painting i mean what wax stein so she just did a free hand a circle of patterns right and a perfect match and she showed me also draw a line uh just a straight line on a straight paper then she stuff on the other end goes right through that first one so it's all by doing this over and over again my experience right yeah very intuitive even even in western art uh lesser lesser artists would create small models before they carved the big one uh people like michelangelo can carve direct so yes the direct method is is is wonderful those people who have that experience that intuition and i think that precision if you carve it your knife is in there you you cannot make a mistake yeah now they i'm sure they had tools that were different than mine they would have tools that could actually carve like have a triangular face and they they would carve but yes again the the artistry and the craftsmanship is very important yes would be like surgeons probably having many many instruments and so on but it is a dying art if we do not try to preserve it it is definitely not something that you see people work on or learn so uh andy have you met any artisan who were working on the uh on the lacquer yeah you know you went to the china you know a lot of the lacquer is very cheap you know fifty dollars hundred dollars you can buy one i think that's all the from the mall they make a mold and the pouring in there and they come out and also just like raising some of them cheaper ones use their acid the rice is easy to detect number one is smell number two if you use the magnifying glass you can see a lot of bubbles in there you know you cannot avoid the bubbles you can find somewhere but mostly i think they use the mall for the simple harvey you know so that's why they saw the marriage for you you know you know they make everything yeah they can do things for them all another big piece it's not like a masterpiece they make just for the tours you know you buy my own you know for your your living room just for good luck and they use the mode that's why because they can mask products and just one color they're pulling in there and now they pick up the mold and they're just carving them a little bit uh are there other questions elizabeth i can see that chuck wu has just raised his hand okay check to speak yes uh you know i've seen vases that are carved in red cinnabar lacquer and i was wondering i seen also a base car entirely in yellow is that very common so yellow is not as common uh if you were here early i showed the orpament mineral that was used for yellow and there were other variations that came later they developed greens and blues also that could be used but the the most prized was the cinnabar and the black uh from the carbon oh okay thank you i also see that paul you have a comment paul if you would like to would you like to speak sure i mean i don't remember exactly who meant to mention it but the whole idea of mentorship how people learned it from their grandparents that taught up to their kids and passed a craft like this you know in today's terms today we go learn something you go to a school you learn in the school you know so i thought that was very interesting to be pointed out this many have pointed out the problem that we have a dying craft yeah and that contributes to the fact that there's no documents uh because they didn't write the documents down they were handed down from one generation to the next so that's why i had to do a lot of experimenting just to try to figure out the right proportions of the minerals or how how finely to grind some of the pigments to really create the colloidal suspension and with those properties thank you yeah thank you paul for the question this is a non known piece of chinese history whereby artisans mostly men i think probably all men would transfer their skills secretly inside their own workshops to their sons because they carry the same family name and so just like china porcelain just like lacquer many of the arts were past pieces of arts were passed down from generation to generation from master father to disciples or sons and now there aren't that many who can talk about this piece of this type of part and that's why it's a puzzle uh to figure out how they could get sea snail shell inlay paper thin onto the lacquer box that would be a great study uh for everyone i'm sure andy ray and even you might be interested in in finding out and also they did not put these procedures on paper they wanted the their sons and disciples to watch them learn how to make the the hundreds of layers of lacquer so this is why it's so important that we talk about it thank you so much paul i can see that jeff trace has his hand raised yeah would you like to speak yes i just had a question uh whether there's a particular town in china that specializes in lacquer like last week we learned about jingdujin which is the uh porcelain center in china i mean there were others besides that but that was the most famous and so was there a place in china or a particular province that lacquer most lacquer comes from i'll let andy answer that one yeah i thought so yeah usually these these things come from southern of china especially in the ozone on the futon yeah because of why because you know we always say you know i wanna tell you so because they make a good coffee why they make a good coffin because they put so many layers that are gonna appear on me to protect the coffee but in that time of the original from there so there's a great popularity also you know in the mean dynasty you have a new called he had the first navy deep sea navy like the silk silk road on the ocean go to the europe because in north africa they built all the boats in the fuji because they have a locker in there because when they build the ship then one of the bottom has so many layers occurring there to prevent the leaking you know so i know about that because they make all the shipping there gotta be they need the sole logic quality of the locker so in their exact time and also the weathers the country can survive in there a lot of the rains the weathers you know that's what make these things over there so the sumac tree does that grow acro most of south china no just a few of parliaments would it be all right thank you so if you take andy's statement about uh lacquering the the ship hulls and you combine that with how many tr trees you would need to generate enough lacquer it's just an incredible amount of trees that you need to do something like that so yeah ray and andy i i want to thank you and i want to thank the uh for this question it is so important that you think about lacquer as being very useful even though poisonous it's very useful the chinese in the south especially in fujian province in the ming area they have the lacquer trees and andy mentioned that the lacquer trees did not grow well in other parts of the world such as europe so the lacquer trees are indigenous to the fujian area mostly so he mentioned a city called leo joe he mentioned fujian for that reason he also mentioned the fact that many chinese beautiful covens coffins were made with layers and layers and layers of lacquer because lacquer is precious and lacquer lasts forever so fortunka he had a fleet of thousands of people and those boats were huge they were maybe 10 times bigger than the european ships and and to to preserve the bottom of the ships lacquer was applied layer after layer of the layer so hopefully someday we can talk about jungkook and his fleet of ships and to talk about how layer was part of lacquer was part of that history but it's very nice to hear andy and ray talk about this and also the questions your curiosity really has driven this uh this presentation to a different level of understanding so that's really wonderful any other questions and comments or comments lily i had one interesting observation and i was fascinated by the inlay technique and the precision of that as rory was demonstrating and i found online on youtube of course a korean artisan who showed his technique which was to use sheets of mother of pearl carve it out intricately and then he applied it to the lacquerware and then put more layers of the lacquer on top of that and as it dried he would expose the mother of pearl and then polish it so using that technique his seams his joints between the mother and pearl and the lacquer box were absolutely precise which is intriguing whether that was used in china in ancient times as well yeah something like that is is would be called the wet lacquer technique i think yeah right that's fascinating but there's there's so much technique involved in this whole process that it's quite intriguing that somebody could figure that out so long ago yeah so human ingenuity is so important so the sheets of the mother of pearl the abalone or the sea snail how was it done what instruments were used what solutions were used how all of that these questions are so very important i don't know if we can find them online russ but i hope you will do some research yeah it's fascinating i love thinking about these things because it's uh it's a mystery you can write your next book what do you think what kind of solution what i visited when i went to china travel to china i visited a furniture store you know they showed how to england this mother pro in the furniture it's not like you know because at least 20 30 people working on this shell and this shell they give to them they cut already roughly cut they are around the one-eighths of the inches you know then they have to send them you know use a handset you know you can see there there's their hair you know some of them is a very rough hand you know you send them and make it fit in a pattern they have a patent you know like say that you know this is the leaves these are the birds have these completely filling there then they finish they got a lot pre-cut you know in there so we asked them you know they said you know they're soaking the some kind of water maybe kind of memory or something you know make them softer a little bit and easy to work with yeah so your your insight into that and if you combine that with my photograph of the naked layers so by applying like you said maybe a vinegar or mild acid to it it would actually attack the organic material between the layers and and then maybe sufficiently allow it to be sliced by a by a thin knife to to release the thin layers that's that's kind of the way i'm putting it together in my mind yeah and you know that we asked what time does jews water for you he doesn't laugh because he won't tell us you know he's saying if they're soaking in before you know before they're going to finalize the things you know but it's a lot of work i i saw it it's not that easy because somebody's a wrong one you know it's not only smooth you know something on the corner is the wrong one you know you don't make like that and you know the wood you cannot unlock her are they you know you have to finish pulling there then make final sand then that's it after the english there then start carving then you know latte you know the mother pearl you can see the carving you know like a bird like birds wings you know that kind of things you know the finals are carving because they send everything in copy so they say this uh the manufacturer yeah this is pretty tough and so far it's not too many french is not doing this anymore because the economy you know the economy getting better they can find better job to make more money so they are kids you don't want to let you know they're getting all these kind of business hard labors a lot of skills and it doesn't make too much money you know that's i think you know because economy to do is kind of art we lost you know because you're choosing chords you got you gotta you can pick and show you know why i'm going to the computer you're doing a computer in an engineer or some iq worker i've made much much more money today you know i think that's the things a lot of things that we started lost and so somehow like before is the government have a special place for them even today in a good room you know they have a special people they keep them alive working the uh in the museum you know the guru is the biggest museum in china you know google the palace is there and you gotta still have a lot of people in there you know how to repair the stuff you know like the the painting how they can repair the painting and they got furniture they they gonna repair them back they still have the people in there not too many no they i i saw some of them some painting like say you see like it might be song dynasty or mean dynasty he totally broke it because he can take the first layer out and rebuild them it's amazing after all you saw his new you know this kind of all the special technique you know they you will only show your pilot you know because they got so many things with repairing there you know they like they got a lot of furniture or something you know they try to go like an original rock this is what i saw on the youtube they introduced they have a special people doing this to prepare these things before they repair they know how to do it i don't know how you can repair them right you have to know the original but what is the technique there so but but not much but the government is uh uses people like a bureau i think eventually they might have a school something you know go for it they can get money you know get some you know pays doing these things yeah in the 2008 when the uh forbidden city was uh going through uh a complete overhaul the uh the olympic committee uh had asked many artisans from all over china to come to the forbidden city because they had to actually uh re repair a lot of the buildings and a lot of the furnitures a lot of cloisonne china all kinds of things so the artisans came all over from china to to help rebuild the forbidden city and actually reassemble some of the buildings while they were doing that they realized that they had to keep the skills alive or else the forbidden city will be forbidden for the rest of the world because if you don't know how to repair they will eventually all fall apart so andy you are absolutely right so i think there is a larger effort now to try and understand some of these how to make these pieces but more importantly how to repair them how to keep them and preserve them so this is an all-out effort so i think it is wonderful that we can discuss uh lacquer today because that's only a small piece of a larger picture so thank you russ i'm sure you have some comments before we conclude today's session this has been a wonderful session and as i told you before i knew absolutely nothing about lacquer but i find it now incredibly fascinating and it seems like we're talking about a type of cultural or artistic technique extinction we talk about the extinction of animals and insects but this is the same thing here i think if we lose this part of our cultural and artistic heritage it's really it would really be a tragedy and that's something we need to avoid you know and i wonder whether andy or ray have a thought about whether this is sort of a phenomenon of our current day whether they were losing similar techniques 100 years ago or is this unique to us no it's it's not unique i think it's pretty universal like my grandfather was able to make the machinery of his machine shop from scratch my father could use my grandfather's machinery i can barely use a lathe you know so so in three generations we've gone from being able to build the machinery to almost not being able to use it anymore so i think it's pretty universal um for me mechanical things have always fascinated me i like to touch things it gets me in trouble i go to our museum and i want to touch but there are cameras everywhere the computer you cannot touch the guts you don't know how a computer works so i think though those skills are are being lost pretty much andy yeah i think you know i agree with race you know and even they tell you how to do it but uh if you pay attention and they if you don't have the enthusiasm i don't think it's hard especially for the art you know and that's why you know the a lot of things uh we don't know what to do today we only kind of join that's sad but that's the way it is so even we talk about the porcelain you know later you know that's a lot of things so many colors we don't know how they make it how they can make this kind of colors you know like an enamel these things you know so hard to make it because the temperature control you know for they say that you know your red colors you need a 1500 degree if you're too high the car is gone the temple is not enough it becomes black in that time how do they know they don't have equipment control the guy only using his hand somebody said that they spit on the in the code they know the temperatures you know this is true they open one bar they're just kidding they're all the time you still need more more fire so they come out these beautiful things is these things easy they say like a red they say the success percentage less than 10 percent that's why you see something red you know we call it ching hua yuri ho kobo under red you know very very hard to get because you got two different temperatures to come up even today you can control the temperatures still come on not all right you know no like at that time they come out so beautiful these are the things that you say you need to understand how they do you know like you take this the layers the the sink spinning out of the sea snail i don't know how they do it but i know that porcelain is hard as you know in that time you know they got the the kiln is so long they call the dragon right dragon kiln you know they put at the higher temperature on the top and all the times you're in the bottom you know they fire how do you know how do they know the temperature because spit the red you know i don't know that the the cobalt you can stay along you know because you can form but the red is very hard you know how they do it they use a hand there's a touch of some feeling that in the film they know how what a degree is there that's an awesome experience you know so some of them is pretty hard and we just say where the keeping of the protect the existing stuff you know and we appreciate these things you know that's why we gotta meet with him for you know thank you russ you have some final comments just just uh to express my appreciation to the speakers and all the guests and the attendees it's been a wonderful session thank you so much wonderful yeah i want to take a moment to thank everyone who has given a lot of time to make this presentation possible the staff at the chinese cultural center of the san diego state university have spent countless hours working on making sure that we have a platform that is convenient that's useful we want to thank the people who have participated not only participating but also helping us to understand what we're doing how we can do better and then of course i want to thank ray for your pioneering work in actually making a lacquer box yourself by the way the the character that you were talking about show you know you came uh you you got the sample from by show to hundred chinese characters representing the same word that is art in itself i agree with rus that if we do not put our efforts together many of the pieces of arts will be extinct that would be a tremendous loss andy thank you for your generous contribution and generosity in showing us some of your beautiful collections your beautiful screen is so large that the only way we can probably see it is to visit it ourselves and so thank all the staff of the museum and the ccc and san diego state and all of you for participating this will be the last series of our series in 2020 we look forward to our first activity which will be the uh our book club whereby dr russell lowe will share with you and his experience in the creation of the three coins so have a very safe peaceful and healthy holiday we want to see you again very soon happy holidays thank you all you

Channel: San Diego Chinese Historical Museum - New Channel

Views: 199

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Chinese lacquer, The Chinese American Experience & Beyond, SDCHM, SDSU CCC

Id: 1Ed07xMEPek

Length: 102min 17sec (6137 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020