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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

February 16, 2012

Vietnamese Vessels for the Heart and Soul

By LEE ADAIR LAWRENCE

Birmingham, Ala.

'Chinese ceramics are good for the eye; Vietnamese ceramics are good for the heart." This sentiment from an unnamed Vietnamese scholar quoted in the catalog of "Dragons & Lotus Blossoms" should be emblazoned at the show's entrance. There could be no better invitation to this display of Vietnamese stoneware at the Birmingham Museum of Art, one of the top such collections in the U.S. along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Dragons &

Lotus Blossoms:

Vietnamese Ceramics

From the Birmingham

Museum of Art

Birmingham Museum of Art

Through April 8

Curator Donald Wood's installation is straightforward: With few exceptions, he groups all 220-plus of the collection's vessels and ritual ware in table-high display cases that fill nine partitioned spaces. As with all displays of ceramics, there is an inherent frustration: Our fingers can't explore the surface of a glaze; we can't lift a ewer and marvel at how light—and therefore thin-walled—it is; we can't flick the rim of a stoneware bowl and hear this high-fired clay ring like porcelain. All we have are our eyes, and what at first seems like a sea of ivories and browns reveals bowls in intense greens, jars with lively blue-and-white decoration, incised vegetal motifs faintly visible beneath thick glazes, and such startling pieces as a 24-inch-tall polychrome jar (16th century) with paintings of winged horses and demon-headed creatures.

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Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum of Art.

A 12th- to 14th-century ewer featuring a dragon's tale for a handle and its head as the spout.

In the process of discovery, we glean a liveliness of spirit and the occasional burst of humor. On a foot-tall ewer (12th to 14th century), a dragon dives into the round belly of the pitcher, its tail curling into a handle, its head bursting out the other end as a spout. Carved on the inside walls of a light-green bowl (13th to 14th century), long-necked cranes splay their wings as though braking to land on a barely discernible lotus bud. In the center of an incense burner from the same period, a dragon raises its head to blow out the smoke. Among the 15th- to 16th-century blue-and-white stoneware, a dish features a sprightly deer scampering along a river and a jar teems with needlefish darting in and out of seaweed.

The ties to China are obvious. Vietnamese potters in the clay-rich Red River Valley near the northern border with China had learned to make high-fired stoneware from the Chinese, somewhere around the first to third century. In the coming centuries they often imitated Chinese forms and glazes, and, as works in the Birmingham collection attest, they experimented. This was particularly true under the Ly (1009-1225) and Tran (1225-1400) dynasties, the first indigenous rulers after centuries of Chinese domination. The bulk of the Birmingham Museum's collection is from this period, considered the heyday of Vietnamese ceramics, which, with no access to kaolin, do not include any porcelain.

Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum of Art

A 16th-century polychrome jar.

The portability of ceramics meant that many pieces escaped the ravages of a brief but violent Chinese occupation (1407-1427) and a long subsequent stretch of political turmoil and war. They made their way over trade routes to Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Japan. It was in these countries that Birmingham collectors first began acquiring pieces for the museum.

This came at the instigation of the Asian art expert Sherman Lee, then director of the Cleveland Museum. In 1972, M. Bruce Sullivan, a Birmingham doctor who had served with the Navy in Asia after World War II, invited Lee down to give a lecture—and got more than he bargained for. Lee suggested that Sullivan and others begin collecting for the Birmingham Museum and steered them to, among other things, Vietnamese ceramics. They were beautiful, available and, compared to Japanese and Chinese works, still affordable.

From 1975 on, members of the newly formed Birmingham Asian Art Society donated Vietnamese ceramics to the museum, beginning with blue-and-white pieces and later expanding their gifts to include a variety of domestic and Buddhist ritual wares. As recently as 2010, the museum received a large collection bequeathed by one of the original members of the society, William M. Spencer III.

Dismissed as derivative and provincial by early-20th-century scholars, Vietnamese ceramics have since come into their own. Research on 14th-century sites in Japan, for example, indicate that tea masters prized these imports. In a display of pieces similar to those found in Japan we see two 13th- to 14th-century ivory-colored bowls, spare but for fluid calligraphic brushstrokes in brown iron-oxide. Moreover, the recovery of a cache of more than 240,000 Vietnamese ceramics between 1997 and 1999 has enabled scholars to establish dates and identify patterns. These came from a cargo vessel shipwrecked a few miles from the port of Hoi An sometime in the late 15th to early 16th century. The show includes a long but fascinating documentary on the subject.

These finds have not provided all the answers—scholars still don't know why, as we see on two upturned bowls, many potters covered the base of vessels with chocolate-brown pigment. But with so many pieces to study, scholars can now better trace the inventiveness of Vietnamese potters who developed forms such as bowls with sharply inverted rims and beakers with straight sides. They also introduced decorations that combined dragons and flowers, a pairing not seen in Chinese pieces. By not including Chinese prototypes, the display makes it sometimes hard to appreciate the distinctiveness referred to in the wall texts. But the advantage is that it plunges us into a Vietnamese aesthetic that variously calms the soul and delights the heart.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

July 3, 2010

It sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel, but a scholar in Manchester, England, claims to have found hidden code in the ancient writings of Plato. If true, the secret messages would have made the ancient philosopher and mathematician a heretic in his day.

Jay Kennedy tells NPR's Guy Raz that his discovery was partially luck. Looking at Plato's works in their original scroll form, he noticed that every 12 lines there was a passage that discussed music. "The regularity of that pattern was supposed to be noticed by Plato's readers," Kennedy says.

More at…

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128288987&sc=nl&cc=es-20100718

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/travel/thisweek/stories/DN-vietbread_0711tra.ART.State.Edition1.4fb9c7b.html