SHANG AND WESTERN ZHOU JADES

March 11th – April 24th, 2010

Throckmorton Fine Art will exhibit during New York’s Asia Week a stunning collection of jade in an exhibit entitled “Shang and Western Zhou Jades.” The jades shown are from China’s earliest historical periods, the Shang and the Western Zhou, ca. 1550-770 BCE.
Jades from a newly-appreciated culture in Sichuan province are exhibited alongside classical examples of metropolitan Shang and Western Zhou jades. Some of these jades are as long as 25 inches in height or length, and they have elegant and eccentric shapes, such as symmetrical trapezoids and triumphant flaring blades resembling the western scepter, which in Chinese is called zhang (pronounced jang). Some jades are delicately incised with mythical imagery or are inlaid with turquoise plugs. Other works represent the menagerie of animaltypes created by Shang artists (see the crouching tiger illustrated above). The uniqueness and appeal of the exhibit is in the contrast of jade from the historic Shang and Western Zhou periods: the striking textural qualities of razor-thin, ritual insignia blades with small-scale, pendant sculptures of animals.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibit features articles by three leading Chinese jade experts: Dr. Elizabeth Childs-Johnson (Old Dominion University), Gu Fang (Science Press), and Meili Yang (University of Arizona, formerly of the National Palace Museum, Taipei). Striking blades of Sichuan origin are discussed in light of recent excavations in China. Shang and Western Zhou jades are identified in the context of new archaeological data. The large-scale, insignia dagger axe called ge (pronounced guh) is analyzed and compared to the archaeologically known prototypical bronze ge dagger axe of Shang and Western Zhou.

This exhibit is not to be missed; it is the first-of-its-kind in bringing together a wide variety of jades from the Shang and Western Zhou periods of early China. The collection was assembled over a two decade period.