THE First Emperor: China's Entombed Warriors, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until March 13.
AS you enter the Entombed Warriors exhibition, an introductory corridor offers maps and some information but serves especially to mark the transition from the outside world of chatter and distraction to the inside space of attention. Then the first things that meet your eye are both simple and quite remarkable; in fact for a moment you may not understand what they are at all: circular disks impressed with stylised but animated shapes of deer, tigers, frogs and dragons.
The creatures are recognisable, indeed vividly emblematic, but not easy to place: it is as though, for a moment, you were suspended between memories of cave art, of Celtic and Viking designs, and of Central Asian decorative forms. What you do know is that effectively you have been transported back thousands of years into a deep and foreign past in which these figures resonate with the archetypal force of dreams.
This opening, and indeed the whole installation by Richard Johnson (also responsible for The Lost Buddhas in 2008), demonstrates the power of good exhibition design to lead the viewer into the experience of works and to shape the order and pace of the encounter, as well as creating an ambience conducive to attention and sympathetic to the quality of the material displayed. One can only shudder to think how the same work might have been shown in most of our big museums, with their populist and lowbrow bias.
The mysterious roundels are the ends of roof tiles, and the motifs are auspicious creatures that surround the house or palace with protective charms against hostile forces. They are the remains of buildings that once filled the populous capital of the Qin kingdom more than 22 centuries ago, a city that amazed contemporaries, but of which today little remains but these tile fragments and bronze fittings such as the remarkable sheaths that reinforced joins in the long-decayed timberwork.
The beautiful works in the first two rooms, largely bronze but also jade and earthenware, lead the patient viewer into a cultural world in which ancient Chinese elements alternate with less familiar stylistic influences from the Central Asian steppes. Thus there are bronze vessels that recall the familiar objects of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, such as the tripod ritual vessels called ding, with or without lids, and various other specialised shapes. But there are also lions and other creatures that come from the barbarian world beyond the bounds of Chinese civilisation.
There are bronze mirrors, too, decorated on the back and polished on the front, just like those used in ancient times in Greece; indeed, the Bronze Age in China is contemporary with the Minoan and Mycenaean Bronze Age cultures in Europe, dating back, that is, to the middle of the second millennium before Christ. Particularly impressive are several bells covered with stylised dragon shapes, cicadas and ritual inscriptions. Bronze was appreciated by the Chinese, apart from its other properties, for the beautiful green patination that recalled the colour of jade, a stone particularly valued as a symbol of purity and integrity; smaller jade objects of different colours are also included in the exhibition, displayed on illuminated panels that reveal their translucency.
These first rooms introduce us to the context of what is to come in the central hall; the Zhou dynasty had begun to break down by the 8th century, first into what is called the Spring and Autumn period, and then into the Warring States. The introduction of iron, which brought the Mycenaean age to an end, also fostered endemic warfare in China. Despite the violence and instability, however, the middle of the first millennium BC was a time of profound development in Chinese civilisation: Confucius, drawing on earlier traditions, formulated the basic political and ethical philosophy of the Chinese, while Lao Tzu taught a complementary spiritual doctrine. The system of writing evolved towards classical Chinese script.
The Zhou dynasty persisted nominally until the middle of the 3rd century, although the rising and extremely aggressive Qin kingdom gradually eliminated the remnants of its power and unified the neighbouring states under the ruthless dominion of the man who in AD221 assumed the title of the First Emperor. Qin Shihuangdi not only strove to abolish feudal privileges that hampered his exercise of unfettered power but also to root out any intellectual currents that could question his right to dominion. He ordered the confiscation and burning of many of the traditional literary and historical classics and, most appalling, the burial alive of hundreds of what we would now call dissident intellectuals: Confucian scholars.
Qin Shihuangdi was not only an odious tyrant but, like most such men, paranoid, narcissistic and delusional. He believed his empire would endure for 10,000 generations, although it lasted only 15 years and survived the emperor himself by about four. He spent much of his reign building himself a colossal tomb to ensure his immortality: a massive underground city, spread across an area of 56sq km, including palaces, gardens and, most famously, an entire buried army of more than 7000 soldiers to guarantee its security. Soon after his death the tomb, predictably enough, was attacked by rebel forces and burned. The wooden roof beams of the underground chambers collapsed, burying what have become known as the entombed warriors.
The site was rediscovered by accident in the 1970s when peasants were digging a well and came upon parts of terracotta statues. This was the beginning of one of the most important archeological excavations of the 20th century, one that is still only in its early stages. Some of the first of the terracotta soldiers were shown at the Art Gallery of NSW -- their first exhibition outside China -- in 1982; almost three decades later, Edmund Capon has organised a second exhibition, including new material of the kind already described, intended to convey a broader idea of the history of the time.
The chamber containing the figures, like the crescendo of the exhibition, is sombre and impressive. The warriors are arranged in a double row, at first looking like a column of men advancing in silence through a dark night. Black reflective walls on either side echo the little troop as though in the distance. Silent and impassive, they represent a selection of different types, distinguished according to rank, military specialisation and costume. The column is led by a general, attended by an officer and followed by foot soldiers, a charioteer and horses, one saddled for riding, the other part of a team of four that would pull a chariot.
Most striking is the naturalism of the faces, or more exactly the differentiation of facial forms and types.
One might have expected rows of identical or nearly indistinguishable features, like multiples from a common mould -- oddly enough, the kind of effect that the contemporary Chinese army seeks to produce in official parades. In fact, however, the makers of these statues have been at pains to give them distinct features and even facial shapes. There are longer and shorter faces, wider or narrower brows, more or less pronounced noses. Some of this can be accounted for by rank -- the nobler features of the general compared with the plebeian ones of the common soldier -- but there seems also to be a concern for ethnic types, as for variations of costume and even the arrangement of hair.
The differences are so pronounced we could almost imagine they were portraits, although this is almost unthinkable; the most plausible explanation is that they are permutations of types that reflect a remarkable degree of attention to physiognomic morphology. The trouble taken to make each figure unique certainly proves this was a matter of great importance, and was evidently felt to give the figures far greater reality and magical potency than mass-produced, identical ones could have possessed.
Fortuitously, the pose of a kneeling archer recalls the similar attitude of one of the warriors from the pediment of the temple of Aphaia at Aegina -- the series is today among the treasures of the Munich Glyptothek -- and the contrast is a telling one. The beautiful figures from Aegina, more than two centuries older than the terracotta warriors, recall the recent Greek defeat of the invading Persians, but the figures are generalised in the Greek manner, ideal rather than individual. The paradox is that these general and anonymous figures celebrate the nobility and pathos of human life, while the particularised soldiers guarding the emperor's tomb are distinguished only to be more effective sacrifices to the immortality of one man.
After the climax of the room with the warriors, the last is conceived as a decrescendo, a transition from the heroic to the elegiac mode. Beautiful bronze water birds, recent discoveries closer to the tomb, are arranged around a mirrored surface that evokes a body of water, while the same black reflective material used in the previous room, suspended above, creates an evocative illusion of depth, of gazing into an underground space. It also produces an unintended but memorable effect: the reproduction of a bronze chariot with charioteer and horses, at one end of the room, reflected twice in the silver watercourse and the black ceiling, seems to hover mysteriously in mid-air.
The silver mirrored waterway also recalls a particular detail mentioned by ancient chroniclers: the immense complex of the underground palace included gardens, at least one of which had a river of mercury. This is not entirely beyond belief, given the scale and ambition of the other artefacts discovered, and the fact the Chinese had plentiful supplies of cinnabar, the natural ore from which mercury is refined. But it is another example of the staggering extravagance in every detail of Qin Shihuangdi's afterlife abode, which makes one think of a buried necropolis version of Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome in Coleridge's poem.
The far wall of this room is filled with a vast black and white photograph of the tomb as it looked before the beginning of modern excavation: a massive treeless hill -- today it is covered in pines -- rising out of a bare, empty plain. What lies inside? The digs in the past three decades have barely begun to explore the site, and have been confined to the peripheral areas; the archeologists in charge believe the opening of the tomb itself may not occur for many decades. How much of the original structure remains? How much was destroyed by the rebels' attacks and the fires that they lit, which are said to have burned for days? We may not learn the answer to these questions in our lifetimes; a sobering thought that adds to the poignancy of remarkable objects brought back from what Hamlet called the undiscovered country from which no traveller returns.
No comments:
Post a Comment