ART REVIEW : Ceramic Show Gives Tranquil View of China

News from China for the past few weeks has been so unsettling that one is hardly prepared for the exquisite calm that pervades “Imperial Taste: Chinese Ceramics From the Percival David Foundation.” The rare traveling show of works from a renowned London-based collection, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Sept. 17, is about as far as one can get from the China of recent headlines.

Three curators--George Kuwayama of LACMA, Tung Wu of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Rosemary Scott of the Percival David Foundation--have selected 58 works from a collection of 1,400 for the jewel-like exhibition. “It’s a bit of everybody’s favorites and a representative group from the collection,” Scott said at a press preview. “The American curators had an eye on things that are not in American collections or rarely seen here, and I pointed out the most important pieces in the collection.”

Decision by committee? Perhaps, but the show doesn’t suffer for it. Though works span the 9th to the 18th centuries and styles run from modest to flamboyant, the exhibition is a tranquil, sensibly ordered survey. If it accomplished nothing else, “Imperial Taste” would serve as a quiet reminder that China is a cultural powerhouse despite its turbulent history and extended blackouts.

That power comes on with a whisper in 9th- and 10th-Century vessels of definite shapes and indefinite colors. This Yue ware (gray-bodied stoneware) includes a small grayish vase shaped like a pair of upright fish, a green-gray spittoon far too lovely to use and a silvery bowl delicately inscribed with two phoenixes. White basins and dishes from the Ding kilns in Hebei province look rather like embossed objects, subtly covered with scrolling floral motifs.

A 7-inch-tall guan (official) vase from the Southern Song Dynasty is considered “the perfect example of its type,” according to Scott, because of its graceful shape, pale blue color and a cracked pattern that complements the form.

Such examples of understated beauty suggest that ceramics was a pure art form, but others undermine that notion. One 13th-Century vase with notched corners, for example, emulates a jade tube, while another vase is patterned after a bronze. Both offer evidence of a 13th-Century fascination with the archaic, Scott said. Another work that isn’t quite as simple as it seems is a yellow-glazed porcelain table screen. Though it appears to depict a rooster looking for lunch in a garden, it’s actually a pun that offers a wish for a successful career in government.

Ceramic decoration becomes more complex as the show moves into the 14th Century. Monochromatic forms give way to cobalt blue and white porcelains sporting convoluted dragons, a wine jar with beaded outlines and lattice-like floral reliefs, and various fussy teapots. One of the most elaborately decorated pieces is an enamel-painted porcelain dish with the gods of happiness, rank and longevity painted in the center and a ring of leaf-shaped panels depicting birds and animals.

Many of the objects in the show were owned by Chinese emperors and have inscriptions to prove it. The late Sir Percival David acquired them over a 20-year period beginning in the late 1920s. His wife, Lady David, writes in a catalogue essay that he was “a born collector” who first visited China in 1924. “He instantly became so attracted by the Chinese tradition of art connoisseurship that he determined to study it in its highest manifestation, the Imperial Collection,” which was displayed rather haphazardly in the Forbidden City in Beijing. With the blessing of Chinese officials, Sir David financed the renovation of a building in the Forbidden City, staged an exhibition of the collection there and published a catalogue.

He went back to Britain in 1925, but returned to China in 1927 when rumors indicated that parts of the collection might be for sale. According to Lady David’s rather vague account, Sir David arranged to buy 40 pieces in an on-again-off-again deal that involved hostile competitors and the temporary jailing of a Japanese dealer who helped him. Those 40 objects are the core of a collection that presently numbers 1,400. In 1950, Sir David gave the collection and a library on Chinese ceramics to the University of London. The collection is now housed in a historic house in the Bloomsbury district of London where it is open to the public on weekdays.