Kaikodo Journal XLI

Separate Realities

Corresponding to the exhibition held between Spring and Winter, 2025. 14 Chinese and Japanese paintings; 20 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean works of art. Preface by Mary Ann Rogers. Online edition.

We normally approach and attempt to understand works of art by contextualizing them, by discovering comparable works that reveal them as individual members of their respective families. In the present exhibition, the various works are thus presented in context but we trust that the individuality, the separate realities, of more than a few of our selected items will show through. For example, a large white stoneware vessel looks as if it must be a Tang amphora but with the neck and handles somehow loped off. However, there are no indications that it ever had a neck or handles. It is in truth a most unusual and, in fact, quite rare vessel. Also standing out as a separate reality among a large cadre of fresh-water jars, mizusashi, for Japanese tea-ceremony use is a Ming-dynasty bucket-shaped celadon, likely with a long history in Japan. Although the design executed in vivid enamel colors on a Zhangzhou “Swatow” ware charger is not unusual, the high quality of the painted decoration is exceptional. And completely mesmerizing is a painting of autumn grasses in moonlight by Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858), an Edo-period master known for his most compelling use of color. Yet here ink alone conjures autumnal colors.

Further, while gathering works of art for this exhibition, we scoured our inventory searching for reptiles that might be lurking there, motivated by a desire to celebrate the Year of the Snake. We were not disappointed. Fitting the bill was a knot of vipers on an Eastern Zhou bronze appendage and many writhing on the surfaces of a pair of bronze axle caps of the same period. Added to these is an elegant Song-period yingqing ceramic official coddling in his hands a small, coiled snake, also an earthenware rendering of the sixth sign of the Chinese zodiac from a set of twelve from the Yuan dynasty, and finally a menacing snake careening toward a group of terrified villagers in a section of a 19th-century Japanese handscroll. Snakes were presented in these works in strikingly different ways, from place to place, from medium to medium, from period to period. Different worlds; separate realities.

Within the Chinese zodiacal assembly, snakes are indeed separate realities. They walk without legs, hear without ears, consume solid foods without chewing, can strike faster than a blink of an eye, and they can “see” heat. Snakes beget dragons on the one hand and humankind on the other. The first ancestors, the progenitors of the human race—the legendary emperor and culture hero Fu Xi and his sister/wife Nu Gua—were human-headed with the bodies of snakes. According to venerated dynastic texts recounting a legendary past, this hybrid was surprisingly not an infrequent denizen in antiquity, and the snake is revered today in many locales, believed to have godlike qualities, harbingers of good fortune, symbols of renewal and longevity. How the snake managed to occupy such a consequential role in Chinese history and pre-history elicits a sense of wonder and invites further rumination.