The deep dish is quite heavily potted, the sides widely rounded, the horizontal grooves produced by the potter’s fingers while turning the vessel on a wheel still evident on the exterior, the lip flattened with rounded rim, and a narrow incurved foot rim surrounding the recessed base. A thick white slip with a clear colorless glaze provides a bright ground for the red, green, and turquoise motifs, some with black enamel outlines. The roundel in the center is the domain of a feisty qilin, propped up on its forelegs, head thrown back with mouth wide open and a saw-tooth spine and dramatically curling tail. The creature is enveloped in clouds above and flowers below, its paddock separated from the cavetto by a border of detached flower and ribbon motifs, the cavetto blanketed with a diamond-diaper pattern embossed with four flower filled panels alternating with large red medallions all enclosed in a rim with sprays of berries and leaves. The red is characteristically matte, the green and turquoise blue translucent, with the blue providing spare but effective highlights. The outer walls are similarly slip coated and glazed but undecorated while the base was roughly and casually applied with a modicum of white slip, soiled by kiln grit that also adheres to the foot rim and areas of the outer walls, the result of having been fired in a sagger heaped with sand to prevent the dish from sticking to the saggar floor or its walls. The dish is wrapped in an old saffron-colored cloth and nestled in its wooden box inscribed in ink on its lid: 呉須赤玉麒麟文 Gosu aka-tama (or aka-dama) kirin mon “Gosu (Swatow or Zhangzhou ware) with the design of a qilin within a red circle.”
The present piece is among a vast group of Ming-dynasty ceramics that have historically been called Swatow wares in the west, the name derived from Shantou in Guangdong province from where the ceramics were believed to have been exported, and gosu and gosu-aka-e in Japan, However, with the discovery of the actual sites of production in southern Fujian and Guangdong, and especially in the area of Zhangzhou, Zhangzhouyao has become the preferred moniker for the ware. Zhangzhou wares range from stunningly decorated overglaze-enameled to graphically complex underglaze cobalt-blue painted, to the astral visions of the monochrome glazed wares to the haphazard, slap-dash, and impromptu products on the lower end of the scale.
The wares were produced for export and their destinations primarily southward: Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines– and the Indian subcontinent. They also gained stature in Japan—found at temple sites and noble and imperial residences where they were used for show and dining implements, appealing as it were to various components of Japanese taste. Some significant collections of Zhangzhou ware were assembled in Japan, where the present ceramic dish, a handsome example of Zhangzhou overglazed enameled ware, was acquired and where others with the same subject, composition, style and quality are held today, such as one in the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo (fig. 1) and anther in the Seikado in Tokyo. These ceramics appear to have been dynamically, forcefully and spontaneously executed but done also with consummate skill and control. Yet, given the two centuries during which these distinctive wares experienced a heyday of production and popularity, with great effort and expertise expended to create eye-catching merchandise, it is puzzling that the backsides of these ceramics were consistently and invariably left in a state of chaos, the Jackson Pollacks of ceramic bases.
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Fig. 1: A large Zhangzhou ware overglaze-enameled qilin-decorated dish, Ming dynasty, 17th century, Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, after Mary Ann Rogers, catalogue entries, In Pursuit of the Dragon: Traditions and Transitions in Ming Ceramics, Seattle, 1988, p. 158.
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