‘The Peculiarity of the Chinese’: The Evolution of the Cloud

‘The Peculiarity of the Chinese’ The Evolution of the Cloud

Kai Farzád Lee University College London - The Bartlett School of Architecture Architecture MArch: Year 4, Assessed Component 2020-21 HT9: Oliver Domeisen / Architectural Splendour: The History and Theory of Ornament 1750 - 2020

For my Persian mom and my Chinese dad.

Contents Introduction 2 The “Peculiarity of the Chinese”

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Linguistic correlations of Chinese ornaments

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Alois Riegl and the evolution of vegetal ornament

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The formation of the cloud

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Conclusion 31 Bibliography 34 Image Sources

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Appendix 1: The cloud on architecture of the later dynasties

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Appendix 2: Timeline of Dynasties in China

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Word count: 4087, excluding title page, contents page, image captions, footnotes, bibliography, image sources, and appendices.

Introduction Owen Jones (1809-74), British architect and designer, gives us a detailed study of ornament’s universal formal qualities but leaves a condemnatory note on Chinese ornament. Alois Riegl (1858-1905), Austrian art historian, lays the foundations for an evolutionary history of ornament while avoiding discussing a particular motif supposedly of Chinese origin. It may seem imprudent to suggest that the methodologies of 19th-century Western writers could be applied as research tools to investigate Chinese ornament, but the cosmopolitan character of their writings calls for an examination of their relevance in the 21st century.

How do their theories shed light on ornament’s workings as a universal language shared by the generality of humankind? Can they still be used to overcome the stagnating symbolist or materialist narratives, which tend to be exploited by nationalistic agendas today? Perchance insights into these and other questions will surface as we trace the history of the Chinese cloud motif.

Figure 1. (previous page) A pattern featuring 3 bats and vegetal ornaments with characteristics of the cloud motif, drawn from a large vase by Owen Jones for Plate IV in Examples of Chinese Ornament (London, 1867).Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The “Peculiarity of the Chinese” Among the distinct cultures and periods of ornaments categorised and studied by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament (1856), he seemed to have been the least impressed by the Chinese (Figure 2). No other text in this book can be found to be more unflattering than his assessment that “… the Chinese are totally unimaginative, and all their works are accordingly wanting in the highest grace of art—the ideal.”1 A decade later he was able to reassess Chinese ornament due to the increased availability of (better quality) artefacts in the West2, and with the publication of Examples of Chinese Ornament in 1867, presented a broader selection of Chinese ornamental patterns in a hundred plates of chromolithographic prints (Figure 3). Jones retracted his previous opinion that “the Chinese had not the power of dealing with conventional ornamental form”3 and happily declared that “the principles advocated in the Grammar of Ornament…. are here also universally obeyed.”4 The “principles” he refers to are the thirty-seven Propositions he outlined in Grammar to define how ornaments communicate their beauty through form and colour. The first thirteen correlate an ornament’s artistic quality with its relationship to the structure and its formal properties such as proportion, distribution, and composition. For example, in Proposition 13, we read that: “Flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but

conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they are employed to decorate.”5 Obviously, the Chinese specimens he studied contradicted this principle in the most scandalous ways, as seen in Figures 2 and 3. Although Jones 1 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament: A Visual Reference of Form and Colour in Architecture and the Decorative Arts (Ivy Press, 2016), 276.

2 The Second Opium War (1856-60) and the Taiping rebellion (1850-64) consisted of raids and lootings on Chinese palaces by the British and French troops, resulting in a flood of Chinese objects in the West.

3 Owen Jones, Examples of Chinese Ornament: Selected from Objects in the South Kensington Museum and Other Collections (London: S. & T. Gilbert, 1867), 5, https:// archive.org/details/examplesofchines00jone/page/n7/mode/2up.

4 Jones, 7.

5 Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 25.

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Figure 2. Plate LXII from the Grammar of Ornament, folio edition, London: Bernard Quaritch 1868.

Figure 3. Plate LIII from Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867).

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found the agreeable “repose of composition” in his later study of Chinese ornaments, he never sat well with the figurative forms, repeatedly stating that “the Chinese have in this style reached the extreme limit of the representation of natural objects.”6 Jones’s early opinions of Chinese ornaments were voiced against the backdrop of an imperialist age7 and were naturally susceptible to criticism, even in his times8. However, it would be irresponsible of us to dismiss his comments as racist and Eurocentric without fully considering Chinese art history and its development up to Jones’s times.

Despite the more extensive number of specimens Jones was able to study in detail, most, if not all, of the pieces he had access to were painted objects dated from the Qing dynasty (1636-1912) contemporary to him. These represented a limited and perhaps less charming sample of ornaments from the Chinese civilisation. The Qing dynasty had a preoccupation with the past9, not unlike the West’s infatuation with historical styles in the 19th century. Court-sponsored reproductions of ancient Chinese ornaments on jade, bronze and porcelain quickly degenerated to a mashup of different styles, sometimes even including those of the West due to increasing contact and fascination (Figure 4).

This eclecticism may be particular to the specific period in question, but behind this peculiarity was a more significant trend throughout the history of Chinese art—the steady rise of representational art over ornamental art10, culminating in recurring renderings such as realistic birds and flowers.

6 Jones, Examples of Chinese Ornament, 7.

7 S. Sloboda, ‘The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design’, Journal of Design History 21, no. 3 (1 September 2008): 231, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/ epn025.

8 The same year Examples was published, a review of Jones’s book in The Athenaeum states, “…that he lives in a world of his own with almost Chinese exclusiveness.”

9 Jessica Rawson, ‘Ornament in China’, in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, First (Chichester, West Sussex. UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016), 387.

10 According to art historian Max Loehr, both art forms existed side by side from the beginning, but only ornamental art was invested with artistic feeling, and remained “the very art form of Chinese antiquity” until the Han period (206AD-220BC), when pictorial representation came into being. Still, for centuries, ornamental forms remained “the ever dependable source of artistic formulations”. It wasn’t until the Sung dynasty (960-1279 AD) when the ornamental tradition ended. By then “there was no recovery: much of the future decoration will be like pictures, while the ornamental elements become stereotyped, conventional and inexpressive- fallen ornaments without hope of life.” Max Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, Archives of Asian Art 21 (68 1967).

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It is this tendency of the figurative Qing ornaments to remain relatively impervious to change which Jones found dissatisfying. We read in

Grammar that “In their floral patterns…they always observe the natural laws of radiation from the parent stem, and tangential curvature: it could not well be otherwise, as the peculiarity of the Chinese is their fidelity in copying.”11 The Chinese, however, have one or two words to add.

Eastern Zhou handles

Ming after Sung bird-and-flower

Late Ming/ Early Qing floral ground

Europeries

Western Zhou ‘Chinese key’

Figure 4. Qing dynasty Qianlong reign (1736-1795) painted enamel vase with “stylistic hotch-potch”.Palace Museum, Taipei. Annotation by author.

11 Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 275.

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Linguistic correlations of Chinese ornaments A considerable number of accounts underscore the symbolic value of Chinese ornamental motifs, highlighting their close links to literary allusions, narratives, puns and rebuses, often to convey auspicious meanings believed to benefit the owners and viewers in real and tangible ways.12 As early as the 3rd century AD, literary allusions and puns were extensively used in poems to prompt particular interpretations13, following a literary tradition correlating plants and creatures to human characteristics that can be traced back to as early as the 11th-6th century BC.14 Direct correlations of individual motifs with classical literary references are still widely known in the Chinese-speaking world and are well-integrated in elementary linguistic education even today. A few examples below will illustrate the complexities of such a system of literary symbolism.

The bamboo, which does not break when bent, represents the principled but flexible Confucian gentleman. Peonies symbolise wealth and rank, while the nandina (or the bamboo), pine and prunus, are often grouped to form the Three Friends of Winter, representing endurance and resilience in difficult situations.15 Literary associations include animals and objects too. The “magpie” (xique) puns on “happiness” (xi), the “bat” (fu) is homophonous with “blessing”, and a “box” (he) with “harmony”.16 The grouping of different motifs could literally spell out phrases such as “may gold fill your hall” or “ten thousand years of forever green”, “peace and auspiciousness”… and can be found to decorate architectural elements, furnishings, dress and utensils, determining how spaces are 12 Jessica Rawson, ‘Ornament as System: Chinese Bird-and-Flower Design’, Burlington Magazine, Decorative Arts and Design, 148, no. 1239 (June 2006): 380–89.

13 Rawson (2006) gives the example of Sung dynasty poet Tao Yuanming (365-427 AD) playing with multiple meaning that the word ju (chrysanthemum) could suggest, including ‘wine’, ‘nine’, and ‘for a long time.’ Like many other instances, this formed part of the literary and imagery tradition of representation, in which the image of chrysanthemums became explicitly bound with these meanings, subject to no further change.

14 “The verses in the earliest anthology, The Book Poetry, or Shi-Jing, collected around 600 BC, make abundant use of plant and animal analogies to describe female beauty and male accomplishments. Other early writers expanded on this tradition, as in the works attributed to Confucius.” (Rawson, ‘Ornament as System’, 387.)

15 Rawson, ‘Ornament as System: Chinese Bird-and-Flower Design’, 383.

16 For a lexicon of correlations between Chinese artistic motifs and their literary associations, please refer Terese Tse Bartholomew’s Hidden meanings in Chinese Art (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, c2006).

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understood and read (Figures 5 and 6).17 There is no doubt that the Chinese script and its literary tradition play an important role in preserving the ability to understand the literary symbolism of figurative ornaments and lend additional value. However, a purely symbolic interpretation of ornaments tends to bind the formal motifs to specific meanings, making them sacrosanct and resistant to change, regardless of the innumerable permutations of literary phrases they are able to compose.

Moreover, instead of being a universal aesthetic experience, the appreciation of ornaments becomes subject to the understanding of particular symbolisms, which risks excluding an audience unfamiliar with the culture. Jones, who would not have understood the literary allusions of Chinese animals and plants, could only judge the ornament by its inherent

Figure 5. The ornamented screen of Liu Ting Ge (Stay and Listen Pavilion) at the Zhuo Zheng Yuan (The Humble Administrator’s Garden).

Figure 6. Two literary allusions are found on this mask. The nandina, pine and prunus form the ‘Three Friends of Winter’, while the magpies and the prunus form the auspicious imagery ‘xi que deng mei’, punning on the words “happiness” (xi) and “beauty” (mei).

17 Rawson, ‘Ornament as System: Chinese Bird-and-Flower Design’.

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aesthetic qualities—a universal language beyond cultural barriers.

As an example, in his account of the Moresque in The Grammar of

Ornament, he describes how the ornament of the Alhambra palace (Figure 7) addresses the beholder’s physical, mental, and spiritual faculties and communicates its beauty beyond its symbolic meaning.18 It is not necessary to decipher the Kufic calligraphy within the arabesque to fully appreciate the ornaments’ artistic value, for they speak for themselves, abstractly. By this standard, which Jones held equally to all cultures, he found the ornaments of the Chinese wanting.

We should clarify that Jones’s initial condemnation of Chinese ornaments is attributed to several reasons, primarily the limited scope of specimens he had access to. We have pointed out that, even after his expanded research, he still felt uncomfortable with the supra-representational motifs in Qing ornaments. Although he generously vindicated Chinese ornaments in his later publication due to their fine composition, it is our conjecture that should Jones have had access to ornaments on Qing architecture such as that in Figure 5, he would most likely have taken further umbrage. For figurative motifs tend to have a tenuous relationship to structure, regardless of the symbolism. He would likely quote to us Proposition 5, “Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed.”19 One last point on the linguistic-symbolic rhetoric predominant in China is its tendency to slip into the nationalistic tropes of affirming the Chinese’s distinctiveness for maintaining a single continuous cultural heritage, giving the impression of an exclusively Chinese origin of the ornamental motifs.20 Here we must give due credit to Jones’s acute observation when he suggested that “this art must in some way have had a foreign origin”21. Although his speculation that Chinese ornamental art 18 Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 185. “…addressing themselves to the eye by their outward beauty, at once excited the intellect by the difficulties of deciphering their curious and complex involutions, and delighted the imagination when read, by the beauty of the sentiments they expressed and the music of their composition.”

19 Jones, 23.

20 Popular online articles are fraught with such narratives, but published books and academic articles are also subject to this practice. Serious accounts do not deny “foreign influences” in diversifying the lexicon of Chinese ornaments, but the conclusion would usually be about the success of ethnic Han in assimilating other cultures.

21 Jones, Examples of Chinese Ornament, 5.

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was derived from “the Mohammedan races”22 is complicated by the fact that some of his specimens were items made explicitly in Islamic styles by the Chinese for export to the Near East23, the developments of Near Eastern and Chinese artistic forms are indeed connected through their respective relationships with Western classical forms. A historical study of ornament is called for, not to claim superiority of one civilisation over another, but to demonstrate “the interdependence of all civilisations of the Old World”24 and indeed of our world, should there still be any doubt even in our times.

Figure 7. Abstracted calligraphy at the Alhambra.

22 “…it so nearly resembles in all its principles the art of the Mohammedan races, that we may presume it was derived from them.” Jones, 5.

23 Michael Snowdin, ‘Introduction’, in The Grammar of Chinese Ornament, by Owen Jones (London: Parkgate Books, 1997), 13.

24 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2nd ed (London: Phaidon Press, 1984), 190.

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Alois Riegl and the evolution of vegetal ornament Whereas Jones’s taxonomical study of ornamental forms across different civilisations suggested that ornaments are subject to natural selection, it is Alois Riegl’s Stilfragen (1893) we have to turn to for a rigorous historical theory of ornament’s evolution.

Stilfragen was a polemical work written when most of Riegl’s contemporaries championed a “materialist” interpretation of art that dogmatically regarded all art forms as “the direct product of materials and techniques”25. According to this belief, ornament, being merely byproducts of technical procedures, could be brought forth at any given time and place depending on the materials and techniques available, without regard to cultural and geographical exchange and psychological factors in the creation of art.

Another theory Riegl was reacting to was the exclusively symbolic interpretation of ornament put forth by the American W.H. Goodyear, who believed that sun-worshipping was responsible for the widespread application of the lotus motif in Egypt (Figure 8). This symbolism ultimately spread to Greece, and, according to Goodyear, the Greek palmette and other decorative elements owe their design to this common symbolism of the sun (Figures 9 and 10).

In place of the materialist and symbolist narratives, Riegl establishes the concept of Kunstwollen, or “artistic volition”, as the driving force behind the formal transition of ornamental motifs.26 To this end, he painstakingly studied the formal characteristics of vegetal ornaments from different epochs, identifying a few stable elements that retained their essential characters while subject to change and transformation.

Thus, Riegl connected the dots between the Egyptian lotus, the Greek palmette (often referring to Goodyear’s observations but rebuking his conclusions) and the dominant classical motif of the acanthus leaf. He found the missing link between the lotus and the scroll to be in Mycenaean pottery (Figure 11), concluding that nothing but the imagination and artistic spirit of the ancient Greeks could have 25 Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, ed. David Castriota, trans. Evelyn Kain, Princeton Legacy Library Edition (Princeton University Press, 2018), 4.

26 Ibid. Kunstwollen is also translated as the “creative drive”, “artistic impulse” or “will to art”. Riegl developed the concept into a perceptual theory of art in his writings after Stilfragen.

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Figure 8. The lotus and Egyptian gods, from Goodyear’s The Grammar of the Lotus.

Figure 9. The lotus as the progenitor to the egg-and-dart motive, as posited by Goodyear.

Figure 10. Goodyear believed that the Greek palmette was a transformation of the Egyptian Lotus motif.

Figure 11. The painted intermittent tendril on the border of a Melian amphora (A. Riegl, 1893, fig.53).

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invented the undulating tendril.27 Having been added to the classical ornamental repertory by the Greeks, the tendril continued its evolution and generated two new forms: the increasingly naturalised foliate scroll sprouting acanthus leaves featured in Roman art, and the abstract stylised Arabesque which is the basis of Islamic ornament.

Riegl revealed that the development of vegetal ornaments did not depend so much on natural prototypes as they did on the decorative motifs passed down through successive cultures. The stylised ornaments were “fitter” and lasted longer compared to the realistic render of real plants. Even the ornamental acanthus leaf, once believed to come from the actual acanthus plant, is proven to be nothing but a derivative of the half-palmette motif, for it looks nothing like the real plant. Riegl then illustrates the plant-like character of the Arabesque branching from a parent stem, before establishing its genetic relationship with the antique tendril ornament, therefore extending the lineage of vegetal ornaments.

In the last pages of the book, he discusses a particular instance found on Persian carpets where a kind of vegetal ornament is characterised as naturalistic. Refusing to believe these decorative motifs to be autochthonous products, Riegl traced them back to Roman acanthus motifs. In this discussion, he gave a detailed description of the decorated border of a Persian carpet (Figure 12), but sidesteps a particular motif, relegating it to a footnote: “The so-called cloud ribbons found meandering among the tendrils,

which are considered to be evidence of Chinese influence, will not be discussed here.”28 We do not know if Riegl ever dived into a study of the “cloud-ribbon”, now commonly referred to as the cloudband (Figure 13). He might have left it out of his account of vegetal ornaments due to its obvious lack of plant-like appearance. Nevertheless, the foundations he laid in Stilfragen for a history of ornament makes it not only possible but inevitable to trace the lineage of this Chinese motif and find its connections with the genealogy of vegetal ornaments.

27 The tendril, in both continuous and intermittent forms, becomes a prominent motif in the subsequent art of the Hellenistic Greek, Roman, Middle Age, Islamic, and Renaissance periods. Riegl, Problems of Style, 117.

28 Riegl, 300.

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Figure 13. The cloudband (After Gombrich, 1984, fig. 237).

Figure 12. (Right) Border from a Persian carpet of the Safavid period. Notice the cloudbands among the thin tendrils, between the large intermittent motifs (After A. Riegl, 1893, fig. 195).

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The formation of the cloud The cloudband typically comprises an undulating ribbon with its silhouette accentuated by cloud-like swirls at the lobed and pointed crests and troughs. It can be found on Oriental rugs, tiles (Figure 14) and manuscript illumination (Figure 16), and is widely accepted to be developed in China and transmitted to the West, made possible by the Mongol’s conquest of Inner Asia in the 13th century. The Mongols’ devastating annihilation of cities provided a tabula-rasa for new ornamental tradition to take ground.29 Having been captivated by the material prosperity of the Chinese, these conquerors adopted their “dress, furniture, and fine utensils in silver, lacquer and porcelain”30, and subsequently introduced these to Central Asia.

To understand the genesis of the cloudband and that of its close cousin— the singular cloud motif (Figure 15)—we shall endeavour to trace their evolution throughout the history of Chinese ornamental art.

Figure 14. Iznik tile lunette featuring a red cloudband, circa 1573. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 15. Clouds on a Chinese porcelain stem cup, Yuan dynasty, 14th Century. The British Museum.

29 Rawson, ‘Ornament in China’, 386.

30 Jessica Rawson, Chinese Ornament: The Lotus and the Dragon (London: British Museum Publ, 1984), 146.

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Figure 16. Decorative cloudbands on a border illumination of an anthology of Chagatai poems, Yazd, 1431. Date of illumination unknown. British Library (f.77v).

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We begin with the prehistoric Yang-Shao period (5th-3rd millennium BC), which produced ornaments with geometrical patterns typical to Neolithic decoration. The design of a Banshan phase storage jar in Figure 18 is part of a universal tradition that served only as a prelude to Chinese art history.31 Centuries after the storage jar, the art of the Shang dynasty (c.17001050 BC) saw an initial interest in natural forms, as zoomorphic motifs dominated the scene. Much like how the progenitors of vegetal motif drew inspiration from real plants without directly imitating them, the imaginary beasts covering the Shang bronze vessels drew from animal forms such as snakes and lizards.32 Most of the forms defining the zoomorphic images reused existing ornamental forms developed throughout the Shang dynasty. The famous Tao-Tie motif belongs to this period. As shown on the ritual vessel in Figure 19, a face is composed of stylised profiles of two confronting beasts (generally thought to be dragons). It has been suggested that the spiral patterns which so often form the background of the Tao-Tie could signify clouds or sky-related phenomena such as rain or thunder, due to the fact that the logographic character for “cloud” in archaic Chinese script is formed by a spiral but it is impossible to establish a definite conclusion.33 It is also worth mentioning here that the discontinuous, centripetal linework of the ‘Chinese Key’ (Figure 17) described by Kent Bloomer34 can be glimpsed in the spirals in the background, a motif even more pronounced on ritual vessels (Figure 20) from the Western Zhou dynasty (c.1050-771 BC).

By this time, abstracted patterns have prevailed over the image.35 The 31 Max Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, Archives of Asian Art 21 (68 1967): 8–19.

32 Chengyuan Ma, ‘The Splendor of Ancient Chinese Bronzes’, in The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, ed. Wen Fong (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 9.

33 Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 224. While Gombrich writes that the Chinese character for ‘thunder’ has been suggested as a possible prototype of spiral motifs in China, I have taken the liberty to replace it with the character of ‘cloud’, for although a certain rendition of ‘thunder’ features spirals , this script was only used in the Qin dynasty, at least eight centuries after the Shang. In the bronze-ware script used during the Shang period, most renditions of ‘thunder’ had a dragon-like figure (possibly lightning) with two phonosemantic circles . Chinese literature differentiates between the “cloud spiral” which is circular and the “thunder spiral”, which is angular. Both are called the “Chinese Key” by Bloomer (Figure 17).

34 Kent Bloomer, ‘Ornament or Decoration?’, in Re-Sampling Ornament, ed. Oliver Domeisen and Francesca Ferguson (Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2008), 46–49.

35 Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, 11.

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surface of the vessel in Figure 21 is “dominated by the slow uninterrupted horizontal movement of large undulating ribbons…and the filler elements above and belong them, as flat grooved bands.”36 The S-shaped ‘Chinese Key’ decorates two narrow registers, one at the top below the freestanding crown, and one at the level of the handles. The zoomorphic imagery created throughout the Shang dynasty has been dissolved by the Western Zhou and replaced with inorganic bands that provided the succeeding Eastern Zhou (770-221 BC) a repertory of motifs to work with.37 This turn of events corroborates Riegl’s proposition that when the creation of a particular ornament depended on natural forms, it would not produce lasting results.38

Figure 17. Kent Bloomer’s Chinese Key.

Figure 18. Storage jar. 3rd-2nd millennium BC. Banshan, Gansu. Asia Society, New York.

36 Robert W. Bagley, ‘Transformation of the Bronze Art in Later Western Zhou’, in The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People’s Republic of China, ed. Wen Fong (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 248.

37 Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, 11.

38 Riegl, Problems of Style, 299.

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Figure 19. Ritual wine vessel in bronze. Shang dynasty (Anyang period), 12th Century BC. Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Figure 20. Ritual vessel of Western Zhou dynasty (9th Century BC). Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Figure 21. Hu vessel, late Western Zhou (8th Century BC). Hubei Provincial Museum.

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While the linework of Western Zhou ornaments maintained the severity found in those of the ritualistic Shang, Eastern Zhou artists transformed them into dynamic meandering patterns.39 Even though the intricately interlaced bands forming the dagger hilt in Figure 22 are designed to be intertwining bodies issuing from several animal heads, the overall visual effect is predominated by the meandering pattern rather than the image of the animal. Apostrophe-like spurs and curls can be found where the meandering bodies overlap and form a gap, as well as the design edges.

These echo the curls found on the Western Zhou vessel in Figure 20 and foreshadow the cloud motifs’ swirls.

The ornaments of Eastern Zhou remained zoomorphic throughout their evolution from the angular meandering creature in Figure 23 to the rocaille-like dragon in Figure 24, their formal development spurred by the increasingly dynamic patterns rather than the natural forms of animals. These were ornaments that were given life, not creatures that were petrified. In Bloomer’s account of the interplay between the cultural Keys and natural forms, he draws a parallel between the Greek ornamental plants and the Chinese involuted serpent and dragon.40 Just as the Greek tendril generated the foliate scroll that became more naturalised in Roman and Byzantine art, so did the imaginary beasts become ever more pictorial, in this case manifesting themselves in the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) as realistic dragons, terrain lines, and cloud scrolls41, which all happen to exist simultaneously on a painted coffin in Changsha (Figure 25).

Figure 22. (previous page ) Dagger hilt from Eastern Zhou dynasty (c. 6-5 BC).

British Museum, London.

39 Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, 12.

40 Bloomer, ‘Ornament or Decoration?’. We need not concern ourselves with Bloomer’s narrative of the Keys, for it is enough for us to utilise his juxtaposition to highlight the generative capacity of the late Eastern Zhou curlicue beasts.

41 Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’, 12.

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In the upper panel, we see the dragons take up its fully-developed pictorial form, surrounded by other mythical beasts and frilly clouds that stay connected to their bodies. Although the ornamental form is used as the basis, the ornament is at risk of becoming a picture, marking the beginning of pictorial representation in the history of representational art.42 In the lower panel, the outlines still echoed the angular bodies of the creatures in Eastern Zhou (Figure 23), but they no longer defined bodies. The abstract, virtually geometric bands have small, curling clouds attached to them, almost sharing the same language as the panel’s border. From here the angular scroll will continue to gain the sweeping curvature already evident in the two dragons in the upper panel.

Figure 23. Involuted serpent on a Bronze vessel from late Eastern Zhou (433 BC). Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan.

42 Loehr, 19.

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Figure 24. Top and side of a lacquer box lid. Late Eastern Zhou (c. 3rd Century BC). (After Loehr 1967/68)

Figure 25. The two long sides of the middle coffin from Lady Dai’s tomb at Changsha, Hunan province, Han dynasty, 2nd Century BC. (After Rawson 1984, fig 45.)

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We have found the early depictions of clouds in the Han dynasty to be derived from preceding Zhou design, where the static zoomorphic motifs initially inherited from the Shang was ‘dissolved’ into geometrical patterns in Western Zhou before being ‘re-assembled’ to form the livelier and more organic curlicue beasts in Eastern Zhou. So far, we have avoided discussing the role of material and technique in this evolution process and assumed that the ornaments had a life of their own. Indeed, one of the merits of Riegl’s proposition of Kunstwollen is that it allows for various explanations of artistic development to come together as different conditions for the human artistic will to act on, as long as none of the narratives is considered the predominant drive for art. Thus, we can readily be convinced that the more organic, sweeping lines in Han art that substituted the preceding angular motifs may in part be attributed

Figure 26. Flaming S-curve, wall painting from a sixth-century tomb at Sammyoli (After Loehr, 1967/68, fig 18).

Figure 27. Frieze from the tomb of Zuo Biao, later Han dynasty, 150 AD. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

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to the progress achieved in lacquer painting.43 The natural resin flowed quite smoothly on wood when painted, and small scrolls and curling clouds were easily added to the lines that became livelier and livelier, ultimately culminating in forms like that found at a sixth century HanChinese tomb in present-day Korea (Figure 26).

The most drastic development that marked the evolution of the cloud motifs was the successive stages of contact with the Western vegetal motif. Even before Buddhism’s spread which brought a repertory of Hellenistic motifs into China from Western Asia (Figure 28), the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BC-220AD) had embarked on military campaigns against their nomadic neighbours and brought the Chinese in close contact with neighbouring cultures.44

Figure 28. Detail of Yungang Grottoes Cave VIII, east niche, third storey, south wall.

The palmette scroll, lotus petals and a version of the egg-and-dart motif are visible.

C. 453-495 AD (After Loehr, 1967-68, fig. 16).

43 Rawson, Chinese Ornament, 138.

44 Rawson, ‘Ornament in China’, 380.

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A late Han tomb relief slab features the continuous Greek scroll (Figure 27). But it is two embroidered silk pieces from early Han which confirm the early transcultural migration of ornamental tropes. The “CloudRiding Embroidery” (Figure 29) is described as depicting the different parts of a phoenix among the clouds. While we labour to find anything of the bird, we cannot tell if our eyes are chasing the swirling outline of clouds or rather the crawling stem of a plant. Our suspicions seem to be confirmed by the elements’ uncanny likeness to the ivy leaves on a Mycenaean vase featured in Stilfragen (Figure 31). A similar play between figure-and-ground is found on another silk piece unearthed from the same tomb (Figure 30).45 Here the geometry is more abstract, but there is no doubt that many black swirls depict profile views of stylised leaves.

By now the evolution of the cloud motif is already inseparable from the lineage of Western vegetal ornaments. The leaf-and-cloud combination would be spurred on by the spread of Buddhism in the fifth century, as it further introduced universal vegetal patterns such as the vine, palmette and rosette to the lexicon of Chinese ornament. On an epitaph border dated around AD 531 (Figure 32), we find the curling outlines of clouds familiar to the Chinese since the Zhou, but the undulating scroll looks neither like the S-curve of later Han (Figure 26) nor like the earlier geometric patterns of the Zhou (Figure 23). With both Chinese and Western designs available to the craftsmen, it is the half-palmette scroll

Figure 29. (next page top) “Cloud-Riding Embroidery” on silk from Xin Zhui’s tomb. Western Han Dynasty. Hunan Museum, Changsha.

Figure 30. (next page bottom) ”Longevity Embroidery” on silk from Xin Zhui’s tomb. Western Han Dynasty. Hunan Museum, Changsha.

Figure 31. (left) Painted ornament on a Mycenaean vase. (After A. Riegl, 1893, fig 49).

45 While the clouds themselves can hardly be described as “flowing out of a parent stem” or be “traced to its branch and root” as Jones proposes surface decorations should, we find that the ambiguous figure-and-ground relationship of the crawling plants allows the implied clouds here to be partially attributed with these vegetal principles.

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Figure 32. (with close-up) Rubbing of border from the epitaph of Mu Shao, Northern Wei Dynasty, 531 AD. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

Figure 33. (with close-up) Rubbing of peony ornament from the tomb of Yang Zhiyi, Tang dynasty, 736. (After Rawson, 1984, fig 53).

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combined with the clouds, some of which are even attached to the stem as though part of the leaf.46 The vegetal motifs will come to dominate the ornamental scene in the succeeding Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), and by then many of the clouds by the scrolls would be replaced by explicit leaves or flowers.47 As time passed, these gradually transformed into realistic representations of Chinese flowers such as the peony in the late seventh century.48 However, the cloud did not disappear altogether. It would re-emerge with traits of peony petals, such as the characteristic lobed head and concentric tiers49 (Figure 34), while it lent its unmistakable swirls to the peony scrolls in exchange (Figure 33), giving the “wind-swept impression of many Chinese flower patterns”50.

The cloud motif as it has developed up until now, will remain stable in the grammar of Chinese ornaments for the succeeding centuries, lending its distinctive form to other motifs such as fungus or waves51, before travelling Westward with the Mongols in the 13th century, taking its turn to influence the designs of “the Mohammedans”.

Figure 34. Bronze mirror, Tang dynasty. (After Xu, 2000, Fig.97 ).

46 Rawson, Chinese Ornament, 66. Rawson suggests that “the impetus for such florid combinations may have come from ornament developed in India in the Gupta period” due to the similarity of the “frilly leaf designs” with Gupta work.

47 Rawson, 67.

48 Loehr, ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’.

49 Rawson, Chinese Ornament, 138. For images of the cloud motif on Chinese architecture please see Appendix 1.

50 Rawson, 73.

51 Rawson, 139.

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Conclusion Our brief survey of the ornamental cloud’s ancestry demonstrated how the theories and methodologies of 19th-century writers such as Owen Jones and Alois Riegl can be applied as contemporary research tools, still relevant in overcoming the symbolist or materialist viewpoints today.

Jones’s remarks about Chinese ornaments led us to investigate the linguistic-symbolic narrative that buttresses the later Chinese dynasties’ supra-representational ornaments. The predominant symbolist account of Chinese ornaments tends to stifle further development of ornamental forms and prevents a universal appreciation of aesthetic qualities, while having the propensity to serve nationalistic rhetoric.

To counter the symbolist narrative of Chinese ornaments, we turned to Riegl for a historical framework to study the etymology of ornaments.

The breadcrumbs he left led us to trace the evolution of the cloud motif through its successive stages of formation and identify critical moments of transmutation across cultures.52 Being a descendant of ancient Chinese dragons and classical Western vegetation, the cloud motif retains a distinctive character while embodying the potential of generating new ornamental forms, such as the cloudband on Oriental art.

52 The different Chinese dynasties have always been capped under the umbrella of “Chinese civilization”, but from our historical account it could not be clearer that this macronarrative of a single culture is questionable if not dangerous. China as a modern nationstate shares a culture with the former dynasties as much (or little) as modern Greece shares with ancient Greece. We think we are justified to state that the cloud motif is truly transcultural not only in its assimilation of “foreign” influences, but also of the diverse elements accumulated throughout the various regimes in China.

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We should reiterate that ornament is allowed to be endowed with symbolic meaning. Nevertheless, the representational capability of ornament should not eclipse its essence as an abstract language that emerges from and is subject to a complex set of parameters beyond symbolism, such as the Kunstwollen. By releasing ornament from the limiting function of pure representation, we are given license to gain a shared understanding of this universal language and to keep it alive by nourishing it with “active procedures of renewal and education”53.

Perhaps China, a nation in the throes of defining its place in the world after decades of iconoclasm, could benefit from this transcultural narrative of ornaments more than it could from espousing a nationalistic art-historical agenda aimed at establishing an idiosyncratic identity.

Figure 35. (Next page) Plate XXIV from Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867), featuring leaves in the unmistakable form of the cloud motif.

53 Kent C. Bloomer, The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

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33

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Bloomer, Kent C. ‘Ornament or Decoration?’ In Re-Sampling Ornament, edited by Oliver Domeisen and Francesca Ferguson, 46–49. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2008.

———. The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in

Architecture. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

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Decorative Art. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1984.

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the South Kensington Museum and Other Collections. London: S. & T. Gilbert, 1867. https://archive.org/details/examplesofchines00jone/page/ n7/mode/2up.

———. The Grammar of Ornament: A Visual Reference of Form and Colour

in Architecture and the Decorative Arts. Ivy Press, 2016.

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Art 21 (68 1967): 8–19.

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———. ‘Ornament as System: Chinese Bird-and-Flower Design’.

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———. ‘Ornament in China’. In A Companion to Chinese Art, edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, First., 371–91. Chichester, West Sussex. UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016.

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Riegl, Alois. Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament.

Edited by David Castriota. Translated by Evelyn Kain. Princeton Legacy Library Edition. Princeton University Press, 2018.

Sloboda, S. ‘The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design’. Journal of Design History 21, no. 3 (1 September 2008): 223–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epn025.

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Naning: Guanxi Meishu Chubanshe, 2000.

Image Sources Figure 1. Figure 1 http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1407710/design-jones-owen/ (accessed Jan 12, 2021) Figure 2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Owen_Jones_-_Grammar_of_ Ornament_-_1868_-_plate_062_-_300ppi.jpg (accessed Jan 12, 2021) Figure 3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Owen_Jones_-_Examples_of_ Chinese_Ornament_-_1867_-_plate_053_-_300ppi.jpg (accessed Jan 12, 2021) Figure 4. ANNOTATED http://antiquities.npm.gov.tw/Utensils_Page.aspx?ItemId=315357 (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 5. EDITED https://m.yao51.com/jiankangtuku/ldlkodkv.html (accessed Jan 13, 2021) Figure 6. http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-41259-618940.html (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 7. http://dennie-travelswithdennie.blogspot.com/2012_07_22_archive.html (accessed Jan 17, 2021) Figure 8. https://archive.org/details/grammaroflotusne00gooduoft/page/22/mode/2up (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 9. https://archive.org/details/grammaroflotusne00gooduoft/page/162/mode/2up (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 10. https://archive.org/details/grammaroflotusne00gooduoft/page/134/ mode/2upFigure 11 (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 11. EDITED https://archive.org/details/stilfragengrundl00rieg/page/124/ mode/2up?q=borniert (accessed Jan 2, 2021) Figure 12. EDITED Gombrich, E. H. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1984, p.190, fig. 237.

Figure 13. EDITED https://archive.org/details/stilfragengrundl00rieg/page/340/ mode/2up?q=borniert (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 14. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/8559/tile-lunette?ctx=b54992c3-c72d4b30-8b4d-19f3d55189aa&idx=0 (accessed Jan 13, 2021) Figure 15. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1968-0423-1 (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 16. https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_8193_fs001r (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 17. EDITED Kent C. Bloomer, ‘[The Greeks] “Called It KOSMOS, Which Means Ornament”’, Art Approaching Science and Religion 6, no. 2 (2016): 45.

Figure 18. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/storage-jar-unknown/ GwF80vcqLfZOaA (accessed Jan 3, 2021)

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Figure 19. https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/art/explore-the-collection?id=11911825 (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 20. https://asia.si.edu/object/F1960.19a-b/ (accessed Jan 3, 2021) Figure 21. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:%E6%9B%BE% E4%BB%B2%E6%B8%B8%E7%88%B6%E9%9D%92%E9%93%9C% E6%96%B9%E5%A3%B603675.jpg (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 22. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1937-0416-218 (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 23. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/bronze-huo-dingpart/9QGDke1imCDbpg?hl=en (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 24. Loehr, Max. ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’. Archives of Asian Art 21 (68 1967): 12.

Figure 25. Rawson, Jessica. Chinese Ornament: The Lotus and the Dragon. London: British Museum Publ, 1984, p.67.

Figure 26. Loehr, Max. ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’. Archives of Asian Art 21 (68 1967): 16.

Figure 27. https://collections.rom.on.ca/objects/343454/frieze-from-the-tomb-of-zuobiao?ctx=b11e80e9-94b7-4afa-bc78-1887478f3ac2&idx=6 (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 28. Loehr, Max. ‘The Fate of the Ornament in Chinese Art’. Archives of Asian Art 21 (68 1967): 16.

Figure 29. http://www.hnmuseum.com/gallery/node/32/25 Figure 30. http://www.hnmuseum.com/gallery/node/32/26 Figure 31. Riegl, Alois. Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament. Edited by David Castriota. Translated by Evelyn Kain. Princeton Legacy Library Edition. Princeton University Press, 2018, p.111, fig. 49.

Figure 32. EDITED https://asia.si.edu/object/F1976.19/ (accessed Jan 4, 2021) Figure 33. Rawson, Jessica. Chinese Ornament: The Lotus and the Dragon. London: British Museum Publ, 1984, p.73.

Figure 34. Xu Wen, Zhong Guo Yun Wen Zhuang Shi [Chinese Cloud Ornaments]. Naning: Guanxi Meishu Chubanshe, 2000, fig.97.

Figure 35. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Owen_Jones_-_ Examples_of_Chinese_Ornament_-_1867_-_plate_024.png (accessed Jan 14, 2021)

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Appendix 1: The cloud on architecture of the later dynasties1

Cloud motif on a lintel of a Ming Dynasty folk ancestral hall in Huizhou

Relief on a Ming Dynasty stone fence

1 From the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. All images are sourced from a Chinese publication cited below, which I unfortunately didn’t have access to until after having written the article. It is hoped that, with these and other images shown in the article, the reader may appreciate how widely the cloud motif is applied on Chinese art and architecture, regardless the materials and techniques involved.

Xu Wen, Zhong Guo Yun Wen Zhuang Shi [Chinese Cloud Ornaments]. Naning: Guanxi Meishu Chubanshe, 2000.

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Detail of ceremonial column in front of the Tiananmen in Beijing, dated to the Ming Dynasty

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Baluster column at the Palace Museum, Beijing, dated to Qing Dynasty.

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Northern imperial path leading to the Hall of Preserving Harmony, Palace Museum, Beijing

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Ceiling grid of the Hall of Great Achievement at the Confucius Temple, in Qufu, Shandong

Imperial path leading to the Hall of Great Achievement at the Confucius Temple, in Qufu, Shandong

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Gable ornament on a Qing reconstruction of Yuan dynasty Temple of the Three Su’s, Meishan, Sichuan

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Dougong structure of the Temple of the City God, Sanyuan County, Shanxi, dated Ming Synasty

Relief on the base of a stone lion, dated Yuan.

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Appendix 2: Timeline of Dynasties in China c. 1700 BC

1050

Shang dynasty

c. 1050 c. 1050 770 770 475

221 771 221 475 221

Zhou dynasty Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn period Warring State Period

221

206

Qin dynasty

206 BC 206 BC AD 9 25

AD 220 AD 9 AD 23 220

Han dynasty Western Han Xin dynasty (Wang Mang) Eastern Han

220 220 221 222

265 265 263 280

The Three Kingdoms Wei dynasty Shu-Han dynasty Wu dynasty

265 265 317

420 316 420

Jin dynasty Western Jin Eastern Jin

386 420 420 479 502 557 386 386 534 550 535 557

589 589 479 502 557 589 581 534 550 577 557 581

Southern and Northern dynasties Southern dynasties Song Qi Liang Chen Northern dynasties Northern Wei Eastern Wei Northern Qi Western Wei Northern Zhou

581

618

Sui dynasty

618

906

Tang dynasty

907

960

Five dynasties

960 960 1127

1279 1127 1279

Song dynasty Northern Song Southern Song

907

1125

Liao dynasty

1115

1234

Jin dynasty

1206

1368

Yuan dynasty

1368

1644

Ming dynasty

1644

1911

Qing dynasty

From Rawson (1984)

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