REVIVAL OF AN ANCIENT ART FORM
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by Michael C. Teller IV
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Mountain path leads to quiet places, the light from the oil lamp in front of the Buddha brighten up the old temple. This stone was collected from Sichuan Province in 2010 by Yang Jun. |
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To the Chinese, man and nature are only parts of the cosmos and although man is an integral part he is neither incidental nor extraordinary. To aid in their contemplation, Chinese scholars have looked to earthly objects whose forms appeared to encapsulate nature: bizarrely eroded stones, a perfectly proportioned forest fungus, driftwood or baroquely contorted bamboo, left in their original states or somewhat altered by the hand of man. The designs revealed in the stone after cutting have traditionally been assigned to one of three basic types: yunhui (grey clouds), moshi or baishi (white jade), and caihua (colored flowers). The immense number of designs, however, defies categorization and allows for virtually the full spectrum of everyone’s imagination to be realized in a physical manifestation. The famous Ming Dynasty chronicler Xu Xiake (1587–1641), wrote that caihua marbles dwarfed all paintings in conveying the true essence of nature. One of his poems reads, “Blazing with color, exquisite, glistening, magnificent, so marvelous and picturesque that no painting in the world can compete with it. The great variety of color and patterns present the life of man and the beauty of nature.” |
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Bounding Deer. The stone was carefully selected from the Dian Cang Mountain in Da Li of Yunnan in the year 2009. |
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Dali stones have been prized and contemplated since at least the early Tang Dynasty (618–907). During the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) a portion of the Dali Kingdom’s annual tribute to the Song Court was stipulated to be Dali marble, and this exquisite marble was used in the construction of the Forbidden City (1403–1425) and in the Ming Dynasty Imperial Tombs. Due to the extreme turmoil in China’s twentieth-century history, however, both the “art of selecting” as well as the preponderance of knowledge of Dali dreamstones was essentially removed from the consciousness of two generations of the Chinese population, with the additional consequence of keeping the awareness of this extraordinary art form from being appropriately acknowledged in the Western world. |
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Michael C. Teller IV is the founder and president of TK Asian Antiquities, and chairman of the International Dali Dreamstone Association. |