Wooden Priests, Painted Dragons

By ROBERT HUGHES

In ancient China, wood was classified as an element, one of the irreducible components of the universe, along with air, fire, water and earth. It was also an element of society. There, and even more so in Japan, civilized life was inconceivable without wood, which furnished a world of artifacts, from the largest temple to the smallest lacquered box.

The nature of wood--its grain, luster, density, color and growth--is one of the material obsessions of Oriental art. Of all substances from which sculpture could be made, wood was the closest to life. But other materials were more durable. Most surviving Chinese sculpture, from the Chou dynasty (1122-222 B.C.) onwards, is in substances that do not burn, rot or get worm-eaten: stone, ceramic, bronze. Nevertheless, the tradition of wooden sculpture was immense. It cannot be exhausted in one show; but this week a delectable exhibition of 70 objects, all from Western collections, opens at Manhattan's Asia House Gallery. Entitled "Masterworks in Wood: China and Japan," it was organized for the Portland Museum of Art--where it opened last November--by Art Historian Donald Jenkins.

A Log Is a Log Is a Log. "Masterworks in Wood" covers a lot of ground, once over and rather lightly. One of the oldest objects in it, a lean and time-scarred funerary horse, was made in China late in the Eastern Chou dynasty, some 2,200 years ago; the more recent works include a scholar's writing box and an incised sign from a sake shop in 19th century Japan. The works are predominantly Buddhist, although there are two or three exceptional Shinto cult objects. The stylistic range is also very broad. Some of the pieces are, in essence, conventional religious decoration --like the spectacular head of a horned dragon (see color page), its jaws rippling like the blade of a Malay kris, which was carried on a lance to repel evil spirits during religious processions in Nara, near Kyoto. Other sculptures are of an intense and archaic severity, like the votive dolls found in 3rd century tombs in what had been the Chinese kingdom of Ch'u. Still other pieces, such as the 13th century Chinese figure of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kuan-Yin, have extraordinary, almost liquid grace and animation that seem to contradict the graininess and density of the wood itself.

A wood carver is more limited by the size of his raw material than any other sculptor. A log is a log; it cannot be melted down or extended. One can order marble to size, but no tree in China or Japan could possibly give a sculptor a large enough balk of timber to carve something as big as Michelangelo's David. Even if there was such a tree, there would be insuperable problems of technique. Wood is grainy. It favors continuous, compressed shapes with a strong axis along the grain. Anything that sticks sideways from the block--an arm, say--is weak and splits off. Hence the elongated, torpedo-like form of a Shinto deity from Japan's Kamakura period (12th-14th centuries)--a courtier, oddly clownlike in his peaked cap and baggy pants, but carved with a reductive formal elegance that might have inspired Brancusi seven centuries later. All its shapes are circumscribed by the block; one could roll it downhill.

Joints and Antique Gravity. Being made from a single block, the figure has cracked badly: wood dries faster on the surface than at the core. To avoid this kind of damage, some Chinese and Japanese sculptors hollowed out their work from behind. This could not be done with freestanding pieces, but it suited the nature of some ritual objects--images kept in a fixed spot and seen from the front. In general, as the woodcarving tradition developed, artists preferred to assemble their work from segments of wood pinned and jointed together. The Japanese, who did most to develop this method, called it yosegi. In this show, the masterpiece of the technique, borrowed from the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a late 13th century Zen carving of a priest, the Hoto Kokushi (literally, Lamp-of-the-Law National Teacher) Muhon Kakushin.

Early sacerdotal portraits of this kind are seldom seen in the West, because most of the surviving ones remain in their temples and are the most sacred of cult objects. The Zen master sits in the lotus position on a plain bench; his robe falls almost to the ground; a pair of empty slippers fit below its hem. Its spread belies the slenderness of the old priest, who was probably about 80 when the likeness was made. His face is all parchment and bone. The prow of a nose and the jutting underlip have a fierce antique gravity, like Renaissance portrait sculpture--one thinks of the faces of Verrocchio's Colleoni or Donatello's Gattamelata. Every cut of the chisel seems to possess the final, unlabored Tightness of a brush stroke by a master of sumi-e (ink painting). There is probably not a sculpture on view in America this week that gives a clearer impression of the mystery of great portraiture: how realism, a recognizable type and shape, can be conveyed through complete stylization. Like a Giacometti, the figure of Muhon Kakushin is both there and not there: close to the eye, but folded about by its own distances.

Robert Hughes

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