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Collecting Japanese Antiques. Alistair Seton
Читать онлайн.Название Collecting Japanese Antiques
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isbn 9781462905881
Автор произведения Alistair Seton
Издательство Ingram
There is a strong connection between national ego and its public collections. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese ouster, South Korea's President, at a cost of $100 million, ordered the National Museum destroyed: the Japanese had built it with window shapes strongly suggesting the name "Nihon." It had reminded Koreans too long of the hated 35-year-long Japanese colonization.
In the same vein, Japan has many national museums and theaters to store its soul and also an elaborate system of national or cultural treasures and important cultural assets. Since 1950, the Cultural Affairs Agency has designated artists and artisans "intangible cultural assets" and "living treasures" for artistic excellence or for carrying on an ancient handicraft.
The need to recall an extinct form of culture may also motivate collecting. Many Kobe people have a few Sanda-yaki pieces. This Hyogo kiln died a century ago but many Japanese have a fondness for local products so treasure its brown and cream-colored pots (though they are flawed).
Mr Koike of Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, a great admirer of Hirado porcelain, gathered 1,500 very fine pieces. Made at nearby Mikawachi, this porcelain had uniquely varied shapes and sculptural features. However, no famous museum has an outstanding Hirado collection, so it is under-known. Mr Koike planned to set up a museum with Sasebo City but sold part of his collection to Mikawachi which hosted the 1996 Honō-Haku international pottery festival and wanted a focus during the fair. Tourism is a common reason for new museums!
Endowing a museum takes a king's ransom. Owners often sell their collection cheaply to an existing museum or donate it as a named collection. You might think museums would jump at a donation and they may, if it includes things they wanted anyway. In fact, donations are often refused, as the items may be outside the museum's scope, or the museum may not have the space or budget. This seems Irish, but if a museum operates at a loss already and would have to devote resources to accept the new acquisition, like space and staff, then it makes sense to refuse.
Pleasures of Collecting
Gardening provides mental stimulation and a link with our farming past. Sowing, hoeing, weeding, and watching seedlings grow enchant-like children or pets. Weather and bugs cause setbacks, while forgetting to water or a week away may kill treasured plants. Collecting has similar rewards but no worrying diseases, while travel may widen a collection, unlike neglecting a garden. Instead of careful attention to the weather, fertilizer, or fumigant, collectors should be dogs-sniff along roads for the scent of your quarry, and chew at books on your chosen field! Buy a few decorative things or others for kitchen use to see what appeals. Only if you are intrigued, should you start on the full adventure!
The pleasures of collecting are bound up with creation, like a gardener. Normally, we non-artists rarely feel the thrill of creation. But putting different works side by side creates links between them not seen before. Perhaps one attractive doll and then another share some characteristic you saw elsewhere. When you put all three together, you may see another link- you are creating a new order. You may also create new knowledge. If some special dolls usually bear no mark, but while rummaging through a store, you find one in an original box which has kanji on it, which the curio seller identifies as being, for example, "Tanaka of Osaka," you may have stumbled on knowledge which is important for telling a future collector and scholar about the creators of these dolls. Do not throw the box away: you are a scholar now!
Decorating your house creatively appeals-a new corner, wall display, or piece of furniture. We enjoy visitors looking at our buys-a talking point, a point of departure for a dinner party. As in walking a dog, you soon find antique-friends. Decorating creates a world, even if just a bedroom corner. If you keep a few dolls or saké cups from each city you visit by the dressing table, that spot serves as a log of your time in Japan, especially if you record the date and who you were with.
Some people get a thrill from showing how many examples of an item they find. If a friend has more, then still feel proud and perhaps find more, but only if you can use more, or want a full collection. Remember Buckminster Fuller's dictum that all things have an optimal length or breadth: "more may be less." Perhaps it is preferable to cull and buy better pieces to outdo your friend.
The spirit of the hunt can entice. There is nothing more satisfying than sorting through piles in secondhand stores for the print you wanted! As hunter, you survey your collection and your prey's terrain, adding un je ne sais quoi to your life. Perhaps you are in marketing and need to hit sales targets. But at the office you rely on a whole team, while the product itself may have little appeal for you personally. It can be hard to love toothpaste or floppy disks!
An Antidote to the Rat Race
If interested, you buy without sales literature or ads in the antique world-and no spiel. A shrine seller may pipe an advanced message: "Gaijin-san. Good plates, very cheap!" That smiling call is better than TV ads or a PR talk. If you go back, (s)he and the others will remember you-unlike your TV. As individualists, dealers are not prepackaged but quirky. They do not commute daily in suits like robots but are often kind. When phones finally started working after the 1995 quake, I got calls from dealers everywhere. Many in far-off Kantō or Kyūshū only knew me as a man coming once a year or so to look, yet they tried for weeks to get in touch with me, out of sympathy. I felt blessed.
A teacher for decades, I love explaining. Bringing varied things together, imposing some order, and explaining them is more satisfying than socially rewarding activities like balancing the books or preparing for class. In some deeper sense, it is more "me."
Some collectors love pictures by famous painters or works once owned by stars, reveling in the prestige- certainly one attraction. Individualists prefer things which are unknown, but might become popular-palpable adventure! Finally, it is fun to have round you things of value at least in the longer term, not in a deposit box. Scrooge missed something: counting gold coins is for mugs. Having attractive, things round you is more fun, more natural than living among landlord- or firm -chosen goods. Even a bird chooses the materials she builds her nest with-"That feather looks nice and I think I'll try some of this down and that moss looks nice." Why not take flight like her?
Fig. 25 Porcelain saké barrel (sakagura) with Shōchikubai trade mark (above is Seishu no seiga- "hero among refined saké ") and bung hole at bottom, 1920s? Author's Collection.
SCREENS AND SCROLLS
For centuries Japanese screens, along with swords and lacquer, have been considered to excel those of any other nation. The Chinese invented screens, but by the sixteenth century the Japanese had surpassed their teachers and brought screens to a stage where the artistic aspects and technical mastery (the way the various panels were joined flexibly but lightly with paper hinges, and panel surrounds were abandoned to provide an unbroken painting surface) made them the gift of choice for highly ranked beneficiaries. Many were sent to Spain, Mexico, and Rome with delegations to please the powers that were back then. The Chinese also imported them. By their very presence, screens tend to overawe. Unlike many Japanese arts, they are painted on a formidable scale. A standard pair of six-panel screens measures 24 feet (7.3 meters) wide and provides a huge, continuous surface on which to paint heroic-sized pictures which can vie with the proportions loved by Louis XIV at Versailles. Screens, fusuma (sliding doors), hanging scrolls (kakejiku or kakemono), fans, and hand-rolled scrolls (e-makimono) have been the main vehicles for Japan's fine art for centuries. To a certain extent, the format is interchangeable. Screens or fusuma may be cut down and made into hanging scrolls if there is a change of mind or architecture, or a part gets damaged. Hand scrolls can be turned into individual prints, while fans are often pasted on screens. Josetsu's early masterpiece, "Catching a Catfish with a Gourd;' was originally a partitioning screen but is now a hanging scroll.
Fig. 26 Machi-Kanō School, "Tales of lse," six-panel