Orientations

For this issue, which features the southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan in China, we have invited Liu Yang, Chair of Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to be the guest editor. The discoveries at Sanxingdui in Sichuan continue to captivate with their fantastical and otherworldly bronzes. The latest excavations from 2020 to 2022 of six pits near the original site, dating to the 12th-11th centuries BCE, reveal strange animal figures, anthropomorphic figures, human–animal hybrids, and large composite works. All six pits were sacrificial in nature, used in rituals performed on behalf of the rulers of the Shu kingdom. We describe each pit and its contents in detail, and link them to the nearby Jinsha site, which likely succeeded Sanxingdui as a new capital. Additionally, we discuss the casting methods used for the Sanxingdui bronzes, concluding that the bronzes were produced through multi-part casting and casting-welding. In Yunnan province, the Shizhaishan culture, also known as Dian culture, spanned from approximately the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE. This sophisticated bronze culture, incorporating influences from surrounding regions, developed a distinctive and original style.

We include two articles on Chinese paintings. The first compares Portrait of a Qing Dynasty Court Lady in the Cincinnati Art Museum with the Twelve Beauties of Prince Yinzhen in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and posits that the former is a painting by Giuseppe Castiglione of Lady Nian, a consort of Prince Yinzhen. The second article argues that the mid-13th century Chan Master Riding a Mule in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, previously owned by John M. Crawford Jr (1913–88), was likely not created by Wuzhun, but rather by another Southern Song dynasty painter. 

We show how a nephrite wine vessel in the Calouste Gulbenkian collection, Lisbon, which was once in the possession of three illustrious owners: Ulugh Beg (1394–1449), Emperor Jahangir (1569–1627), and Shah Jahan (1592–1666) was used to reconcile conflicting identities as part of a larger self-fashioning strategy.

We present the winning essay of the second edition of the Young Art Writers Award, sponsored by the Susan Chen Foundation. It explores Ming and Qing dynasty birthday hangings, which were commonly given as gifts to elderly recipients to decorate banquet venues.

Three significant donations of batik—a colourful patterned cotton fabric made by resist-dyeing with wax—have been made to the Peranakan Museum in Singapore. We feature an article on the museum’s first exhibition of batiks by three generations of Peranakan women from Pekalongan, Indonesia.