Ming-style furniture is the pinnacle of furniture history in China. With its simple lines, simple textures, vivid charm and simple artistic conception, it has become a popular collection cherished by Chinese and western collectors. The rapid rise of Ming-style furniture is a legend, which was created by the literati's interest in practical appliances and aesthetic transformation. Appreciating Ming-style furniture can touch the spiritual world of Ming and Qing literati.
Cultural celebrities like being designers.
Even when we meet for the first time, it is easy for us to distinguish Ming furniture from qing-style furniture. The former is the ultimate subtraction, simple and ethereal, full of literary flavor; The latter is the ultimate addition, heavy and luxurious, full of wealth.
The popularity of Ming-style furniture was inseparable from the literati class that dominated social aesthetics at that time. At that time, a large number of literati and even cultural celebrities participated in the design and production of Ming furniture.
Gao Lian, a famous dramatist in Ming Dynasty, designed two kinds of furniture in Eight Chapters of Respect for Life. One is a bed, and the backrest of the chair ring is like a frame, which can be raised and lowered. "It's wonderful to lie drunk, read a book, and lie down to kill time." The other is called a two-way bed, with copper hooks nailed to the bedpost to hang bottles.
Dramatist and writer Tu Long collected portable furniture specially designed for outing, such as folding tables, which can be disassembled, opened into tables and folded into boxes for easy carrying. The suitcase is similar to the suitcase used for today's travel; The suitcase is layered vertically and can hold cups, plates, wine sets and food.
The dramatist Li Yu designed a cool chair and a warm chair in My Casual Story. The stool is a small low stool. The cold stool surface is empty, and there is a cavity in it to store cold water. The warm chair is a modified desk with a drawer burning charcoal at the bottom. Half of the body is hidden in the table to keep warm, and the desktop can also keep warm. If you want to go out, just add some cross frames and lift them.
Tang Bohu is not only a great painter, but also a furniture designer. When he copied Han Xizai's Night Banquet, he added more than 20 pieces of Suzhou Ming-style furniture, including tables, desks, stools and screens, in addition to the original. In The Picture of Chyi Chin's Painting and Calligraphy Characters, he showed the writing style of the Ming literati in a panoramic way. There are more than 30 kinds of furniture such as screens, bamboo chairs, incense sticks and couches in the painting, which reflects his talent in furniture design and structure.
Aesthetics is a social trend of thought.
The participation of literati in furniture design is a brand-new social phenomenon in the late Ming Dynasty. Traditional China people are divided into four categories: scholars, farmers, workers and businessmen. Literati and scholars generally despise craftsmen and disdain to associate with them. So why was this phenomenon broken in the late Ming Dynasty? We should find the answer from the background of the middle and late Ming Dynasty.
Practical application is the traditional value orientation of China literati. However, this ideal was difficult to realize in the officialdom in the late Ming Dynasty, because the eunuchs monopolized the power and the civil servants fought for the party, which made the ecological environment of the officialdom very bad. At the same time, in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the commodity economy developed, the city scale expanded and the life was rich. There is a struggle for power and profit above the temple, and there are beautiful scenery between the rivers and lakes. City life with dignity and quality attracts the literati class like a magnetic field.
More importantly, an unprecedented wave of human liberation swept through China at that time. Wang Yangming's theory of mind takes "conscience" as the noumenon of the heart and takes the heart as the master of all things in the world. The practice method of mind learning is "the unity of knowledge and action". Therefore, poetry, calligraphy and painting, literary drama gardens and operas in literati's life are not only poetic life and luxurious enjoyment, but also become the path for literati to pursue the realm of harmony between man and nature and create a small world to observe the big universe. Pursuing and appreciating beauty has become a social fashion. Under the fashion of entertainment and determination to Taoism, literati and craftsmen are integrated to study food, clothing, housing and transportation, including furniture.
Pursuing the leisure and freedom of the mind has become a life attitude of literati. Ming-style furniture has a simple style and few inscriptions, but from a few pieces of furniture, we can still feel a spiritual pursuit. In the Palace Museum, there is a piece of tree root furniture originally hidden in Kangshan Caotang, Yangzhou. In Dong Qichang's inscription, there are sentences such as "Pine trees have no articles, straight trees should not be cut first", and in Chen Jiru's inscription, there are sentences such as "Xiang Shu Yun Xiang, auspicious wood". The painting case of Lei, an old pharmacy in Suzhou, was collected in Nanjing Museum. Fully engraved with the seal script of "beautiful materials, simple and elegant work, relying on fake work, avoiding me for a hundred years"; One of his disciples, Zhou You, has a rosewood chair, leaning on the board and inscribed "If you sit still for nothing, one day is like two days, and you live 70 years, you will be 140 years old", which adds elegance and charm to Ming-style furniture.
It is the sustenance of a philosophical concept.
Because of the participation of literati, Ming-style furniture is no longer just a living appliance, but also a sustenance of philosophical concepts and a manifestation of "Tao".
The literati class loves Ming-style furniture, first of all because of the natural beauty of its materials. Wang listed the beauty of materials as the first beauty of Ming furniture. Ming-style furniture is mostly made of rosewood, rosewood, chicken wing wood, ironwood and ebony. Huang Huali's patterns are euphemistic and circuitous, such as flowing water, unpredictable, and some are clustered and colorful, which are called raccoon heads and ghost faces; The texture of wingwood is slender and tortuous, just like the feathers on the neck and wings of birds; Red sandalwood is the heaviest among hardwoods, and its color ranges from brownish purple to thick black. Although the pattern is not obvious, the color is simple and quiet, the texture is dense and dignified, and it has the feeling of beautiful jade and Qiong Yao, ranking first among all trees. As for beech, that is, the scar on the root or trunk, its texture is peculiar, including grape grain, landscape pattern, tiger skin pattern, Fengyun pattern and so on. The use of beech wood material is a major feature of Soviet furniture, which embodies the orientation of taking nature as beauty. Taoism is natural, which is one of the roots of China traditional culture. Ming-style furniture shows the beauty of wood as much as possible, and the carving and embedding techniques are only slightly displayed in some areas; Try not to use wooden nails and glue, mainly use mortise and tenon structure to eliminate the traces of axe chisel, which looks natural; There is no need to paint, so it won't hide the wood. Wen Zhenheng's "Chronicles of Long Stories" thinks that "painters are especially vulgar" when talking about desks. The color of Ming-style furniture is warm and subtle, not stimulating and not making public, which is one of the qualities of a gentleman.
The modeling of Ming-style furniture is simple and clean, and it is characterized by lines, but the simplest lines can express the deepest artistic conception. Every line of Ming-style furniture is exquisite and smooth, even straight lines are square and round, and the taste of Xiao Zhuan can be read in calligraphy. These lines leave a lot of space, simple and simple, and less wins more, just like blank space in Chinese painting. This combination of reality and reality is precisely the subtlety of China's philosophy, which is full of Zen and rational interest. Shen Jie
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