Traditional Chinese furniture

Author: Pan Jialai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Furniture is a must-have decorative item in every room, and its different styles and arrangements can reflect the owner's unique taste and style. What are the distinctive features of the furniture in your room? This book collects furniture used in daily life or of significant value throughout history, allowing you to appreciate China's traditional craftsmanship. From theblock of stone, human civilization has advanced step by step through the continuous labor of human hands, presenting the colorful scene we see today. In the three hundred years since industrialization, we have entrusted too much work to machines. However, the production of machines is ultimately too rigid and uniform. When surrounded by products made on assembly lines, we suddenly realize that life has become lacking in spirit, beauty, and classical charm. As a result, more and more people are beginning to search for the objects their ancestors made and used by hand. Porcelain fragments, jade pendants, silver hairpins, wooden utensils—blocks of wood carving, purple clay teapots, even bricks and tiles—all have been meticulously crafted by ancestors with their hands, retaining their warmth and engraved with our nation's totems. Occasionally discovering them is like cherishing treasures, bringing great joy and solace in the process of searching and handling. Traditional craftsmanship is an important part of our excellent cultural heritage. Chinese jade, silk, lacquerware, porcelain, and Ming and Qing furniture are among the finest handcrafted products in the world, achieving extremely high levels of skill and aesthetic craftsmanship in many aspects. However, in the long-term Confucian culture that emphasized principles over objects, the making of utensils was always regarded as a mere trivial skill, not worthy of mention in major official records and histories. The only detailed historical records available for reference are limited to works like the Rites of Zhou·Winter Officials·Examined Workshops and the Treatise on the Mysterious Arts and Vast Works. Compiling this Series on Traditional Chinese Craftsmanship Culture is to take readers back to the countryside, visit craft workshops, meet masters and collectors, and listen to the legendary stories behind them. Yang Yao was the first Chinese scholar to study traditional furniture using modern methods. Around 1944, while serving as an associate professor at Peking University's School of Engineering and later as the chief architect at the Beijing Industrial and Architectural Design Institute, he focused on and led systematic research on traditional furniture. He wrote numerous papers, including A Brief Overview of Ancient Chinese Furniture, Ming Dynasty Interior Decoration and Furniture, The Art of Ming Furniture, and The Artistic Status and Style of Ming Furniture, which are important academic works on traditional Chinese furniture research. Another renowned scholar who made significant contributions to the study of traditional Chinese furniture is Wang Shixiang. Wang began to focus on traditional Chinese furniture during the War of Resistance. In 1960, he published Ancient Chinese Furniture—From Shang to the Early Qing, and in 1961, he taught The History of Chinese Furniture Styles at the former Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. In 1985, he published Treasures of Ming Furniture in Hong Kong, which sparked renewed international interest in traditional Chinese furniture and once again fueled the global trend of collecting classical Chinese furniture. If Yang Yao, as an architect, conducted more rational research on traditional furniture from an object-based perspective, then Wang Shixiang, as a cultural figure, expanded the humanistic connotations of traditional Chinese furniture.