Recently in antiques Category

Yesterday I went out looking at antique furniture on the outskirts of Beijing with Roger Schwendenman of the ACF company. Roger is a specialist in wholesale furniture and has his own restoration workshop, and it was interesting to go look at unrestored furniture "fresh from the countryside" versus the fully restored variety that we see at most furniture sellers in Beijing.

In years gone by furniture vendors from the countryside came right into the city to sell their furniture, but these days with increasing ground rents and lack of space in the city the trade is conducted much further out from the city, in this case about 45 minutes drive from Guo Mao. This spot is strictly a wholesale market, with unrestored items piled high in the warehouses of individual sellers from different parts of China. In a couple of hours we were only able to scratch the surface of what is a very large market. We visited several vendors from north China (Shanxi and Inner Mongolia), though apparently there are sellers at the market from most regions. It's been a long time since I have looked at wholesale furniture like this (the last time I looked at it seriously was back in the mid-90s) and it was reassuring to see that there is still old furniture out there! Vendors are now going a lot further afield for their old furniture than in the '90s and many are bringing in furniture from the border regions versus the central China styles that were more common in previous years.

Aside from carved coffers, money chests, cots for children, side tables and other typical Chinese furniture we also saw wood blocks for printing funerary "money", door hangings and weapons for defending against wolves.

Buying pieces independently from this market is tricky (you would need to find transport, then arrange for the piece to be cleaned and repaired), but Roger can help with that aspect, and has been taking wholesale customers from overseas to this market for many years. You would also need to be a little braver and bolder than the average customer since you will need to imagine what a dusty, unrestored piece will look like in its finished state (the difference can be dramatic!).

I am not sure if Roger plans to make these trips a regular event, but I can certainly recommend it to anyone who wants to trace antique Chinese furniture back to its source. (Roger is the tall one in the center of the photo).

On Sunday 8th April 2009 Sotheby's will sell the "Bei Gu Cang" collection of Chinese furniture in Hong Kong. They have put an excellent downloadable catalogue (in pdf form) of the furniture on their website (link at the bottom of this page): it is perhaps the best free book on Chinese furniture that we are likely to be offered this year, with superb illustrations. It also provides an interesting alternative perspective on Chinese classical furniture, re-focusing attention on lacquered furniture and counterbalancing a bias in most published works that feature mainly hardwood pieces.

The collection consists of classically styled furniture finished in red and black lacquer, both plain and inlaid with stone and mother of pearl or finished with flecks of mother of pearl. Some of the shapes will be familiar to furniture collectors, but many of the finishes and decoration will be a revelation. The catalogue includes informative essays by Jerry JI Chen on lacquered furniture, highlighting a Ming Imperial preference for red lacquer, later replaced by Qing taste that seems to have preferred black pieces, by Hajni Elias on the refurbishment of the Forbidden City after a major fire in 1597, and Imperial lacquered pieces by Palace Museum specialist Hu Desheng.

It may come as a surprise to those who associate "Ming" furniture with huanghuali and other hardwoods to find that these types are not mentioned in the early and mid-Ming descriptions of interior furnishings mentioned in these essays: instead lacquer reigns supreme in these periods, and still appears to have been the finish of choice in the late Ming (Wanli) period, from which most of the items in this catalogue appear to date. This is not a new finding: it has been well understood by furniture scholars for some time and referred to in publications by Sarah Handler and Craig Clunas for example, but with a few exceptions most of the pieces illustrated in books by those writers and others have been hardwood, while this catalogue provides solid evidence of a different taste. The items range from simple tables with plain red and black finishes, to sumptuous cabinets with inlaid or painted decoration in gold.

The reason for the bias towards hardwoods in present-day collections and publications is principally because lacquer finishes are not durable, and they are exceedingly tricky to restore. A western taste for polished hardwood may also have directly or indirectly influenced the antique furniture trade in China: why spend time and money restoring a softwood piece with a lacquer finish when it can be stripped, stained and sold much more readily as "faux-hardwood"? The tastes of the foreign clientele who bought restored Chinese furniture from the 1930s onwards may have unwittingly distorted the entire history of Chinese traditional furniture.

In the mid-1990s I lived in South China, in a region where much of the furniture trade maintained warehouses for the collection of old furniture, prior to restoration and shipment to Hong Kong. I recall looking at great piles of unrestored furniture and being struck by the quantities of decayed lacquer, mostly destined to be sanded off and stained brown prior to sale. The only items where lacquered finishes were frequently preserved were large cabinets with genre scenes painted on the front faces. This is perhaps because large flat surfaces held onto their lacquer coats better than other types of furniture, but also because furniture dealers (perhaps) sensed value in the attractive paintings on these items. There are still nice pieces to be had (occasionally) in furniture warehouses, but watch out for repainting and re-gilding.

The fact is that lacquer, particularly the kind applied thickly on top of a base of cloth impregnated with clay, does crack with age. This feature was in fact expected and celebrated by Chinese furniture connoisseurs from the early Ming: the crackle on furniture was admired and compared to the patterns on the backs of turtle shells. After this period tastes changed, and celebration of the ephemeral aspects of life amongst the literati of the Ming was replaced by the aristocratic showiness of the Qing period. The increasing importation of hardwoods from southeast Asia from the 1700s onwards also provided new interests, though lacquered furniture continued to be popular through the 18th and 19th centuries. The true inheritors of the early Ming and pre-Ming tastes (as in so many other aspects) are perhaps the Japanese, where lacquered finishes designed to crackle, wear and decay in interesting ways are still made to this day.

While most of us will not be bidding on these items on the 8th April (estimated prices running from the hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions), this catalogue is nevertheless worth downloading and studying by anyone with a more than superficial interest in Chinese furniture. The shapes and decoration of such pieces, used by the Chinese court and by noble families, provided the prototypes for the countless thousands of pieces of Chinese furniture, both from town and country, that came after.

To download the sale catalogue follow this link, click on "Ming Imperial Furniture"  and then on "view catalogue" at the bottom of the page. It's 38Mb so will take a little while to download.

There are some general tips on shopping for Chinese antiques, including furniture on my website, where as a bonus you can also gaze enviously at my own Ningbo lacquered cabinet.

First of all, let me say straight away that I am not a sentimentalist when it comes to Beijing's old Hutong (courtyard house) districts. Aside from the wealthiest merchant homes, most of them were not built to a high standard and not the greatest places to live in today, unless you enjoy brushing your teeth by a standpipe in the yard in the middle of winter. That said, a city's past is important, and while not everything can or should be preserved, it's incumbent on the present generation to make sure that there are some reminders of Beijing's past left for those who will come after.

This is where the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center come in. For the past several years they have been quietly promoting conservation-standard techniques and materials to home owners wanting to restore old hutong areas. This is important because the standard method in the past has (all too often) been to pull the old building down entirely and build a vaguely hutong-like structure out of reinforced concrete to replace what was there before. The CHP have been promoting the traditional Beijing style in which the main structure of the building is built around wooden columns, supporting a traditional roof held up by a bracket arrangement, with the brightly painted eaves that are characteristic of Beijing architecture.

Aside from technical competence, the main factor behind the CHP's success with their approach has been a committed (and local) membership, rather than the expat-driven approach which has characterised many conservation efforts over the years.

For more information about the CHP's program, take a look at their website (English and Chinese).

A couple of weeks back I was in Lhasa visiting our workshop. Buying jewelry from nomad visitors who are in town on pilgrimmage is an (entertaining) bonus.

Nomad tastes are eclectic, so their strings of beads combine "stones" which may only be a few decades old (including lots of newish dzi beads from Taiwan and Guangdong) with beads that may be centuries old. The oldest beads I have ever seen in nomad necklaces are agates in distinctive shapes from Inner Mongolia, which date back to the Liao dynasty (around 900 years old). If only they could be induced to speak...

There are necklaces in our Kempinski store made from old beads refashioned into contemporary settings.