Hi, name is John from ChineseAntiqueFurnitureShop.com. Today, we’re going to talk about architectural fragments. How do you get architectural fragments from China? What has caused all these fragments to be available on the market? A lot of is China’s modernization program which has constructed many, many new buildings in China’s major cities and it’s done so by destroying the older houses that occupied the land. From these come many different kinds of fragments and we’re going to talk about some of them today.
The first type of fragment that I want to talk about, is what I call the pierced carving fragment. And I’ll take this down from the wall so that you can see that you literally can see through this. And this, because of its fragility is one of the most unusual kind to find in a relatively good condition.
The second type of carving that I want to talk about is one where it is obvious from looking at the physical carving where it kind of came from, how was it was constructed. It’s not from looking at the front. From the front is just a nice carved scene with wood in the background. But when you take it off the wall and look at it from behind, you can see that this came out of two conjoined logs that were part of, I presume a wall or a ceiling or something like that. You can see at the end really that it’s just raw wood.
The third type of carving that I want to talk about is exemplified here. Originally attached to architectural support for a house, nonetheless the carving itself extends beyond what would have been the architectural support. It may not be as obvious from looking at the front but when you look at the back, you can see how it was cutoff from an architectural support here, it was supported by a timber frame here, but clearly the wings and the tail of this animal were in quite a fact, coming out or separate from the actual architectural support that was attached to.
Carvings of course were highly symbolic, often highly symbolic and added elements of blessing or protection to a house. This pair of the stellar trio is very interesting to me in terms of how it was extracted from the house. If you turn to the back when this was removed from the house, it actually had an extension or a length here of plane wood that it sort of sacked in and then this was a curved portion of the wall pole or ceiling pole to which this was originally attached.
Last that I want to talk about are warp hole signs. Now these signs were actually hung on the interior poles supporting the house. So in a kind of literally sense, they’re not fragments but there’s so much part of the Chinese architecture that I wanted to talk a little bit about them and show you what they were. This is a pair which commemorates a man and a woman in old age. But if you look at the back you could see how they were curved in order to go around the pole. And these signs are highly decorative even when hanging on a flat wall.
This concludes this video on Chinese architectural fragments. I hope you find it interesting and I also hope that you’ll please visit our website at chineseantiquefurtnitureshop.com. Sign up for our news letters so you can be alerted to changes in our web and additional videos. Thanks so mush for watching.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services