image interpretation

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The Chinese consider bats to be good luck, and they are symbols of a long life and happiness. In Chinese, the word for "bat" is the same sound as the one for "good fortune." Bats were thought to live for a thousand years.

You will often see a bat on a tile, sometimes readily identifiable and sometimes so stylized it is hard to see. Today we will see a few easily recognizable ones. Many have ears and even whiskers, making them quite endearing.

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The tile above from a Shanghai Luck Set has two bats, one on each side of the Wan. Paired with the peaches on the top and bottom of the tile, the tile augers well for longevity.

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This bat is a bit more stylized, though recognizable. Note the rounded shapes to the left in front of the bat, and to the right behind it, symbolizing clouds.

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The bat on the above tile is one of four flying creature tile Flowers in a set; the other three are birds.

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Above is a similar one from Katherine Hartman's collection. You will notice that each bat is cropped by the tree. The tree, a pine, is another symbol for longevity.

Bats appear in many forms of Chinese art, and they were deemed important from very early days. Here are some captured on robes made for royalty.

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This robe, auctioned off at Sothebys during Asia Week 2014, is an Imperial robe from the 19th Century. You can see a bat flying toward the upper left.

The beautiful robe below was shown by Alan Kennedy in his Asia Week Exhibition : Qing Dynasty Women Concubines & Meiren.

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The bat is flying just above the dragon.

There are some other fabulous robes in the Metropolitan Museum collection.

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The garment above uses peacock feathers twisted into silk thread for the embroidery, a technique dating from the fifth Century. The bat is just over the dragon's head.

A better view of the greens:

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Bats remain important to Chinese culture. Here's a different kind of robe done by the artist Wang Jin in Dreams of China. The pvc robe is embroidered with fishing line to create the patterns.

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Don't forget the bats!

Please email us if you have any recognizable bats in your mahjong collection.

kuanyinart@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Chinese art there is no requirement that an object be seen in its entirety, and this idea has existed for hundreds of  years. In landscapes, water scenes with boats, mountains and rock outcroppings with trees often appear, sometimes in simplified form.

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These two tiles are from a Chinese Bakelite set. You can see the boat continues from one tile to the next, but still not seen in its entirety. Notice how a tree trunk is captured on the right tile.

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This special ink and color scroll was painted by Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien) who lived from 1899 until 1963. It is entitled The Bridge to Eternity. You can see a lone fisherman in his boat at the water's edge, with the boat somewhat hidden behind a small projection of the landscape. But objects don't have to be hidden to be simplified:

 

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(This tile is not half of a two tile set)

There is no need to show the whole object if people can figure out what it is.

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Looking at these tiles again you can note how here too boats are somewhat hidden by land outcropping, with trees along the rocky shoreline and mountains. You will see a partial bridge on the lower left tile,  a structure also seen on the Zhang Daqian scroll above.

 

 

 

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From the Metropolitan Museum website:

"Images of nature have remained a potent source of inspiration for artists down to the present day. While the Chinese landscape has been transformed by millennia of human occupation, Chinese artistic expression has also been deeply imprinted with images of the natural world. Viewing Chinese landscape paintings, it is clear that Chinese depictions of nature are seldom mere representations of the external world. Rather, they are expressions of the mind and heart of the individual artists—cultivated landscapes that embody the culture and cultivation of their masters."

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/clpg/hd_clpg.htm

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The artist who carved these bone and ebony tiles created designs similar to those done by other Chinese artists who worked in other media such as watercolors and ink drawing. Objects were captured with a few strokes giving the viewer all necessary clues to know what was depicted.

Here are two works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

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The artist has captured the essence of the scene, with a fisherman in a boat halfway up on the left, and two bridges, one in the forefront and one in the center.

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This beautiful work features sailboats in the distance. The boats in each help to fill the void created by the water, fitting in with Chinese design principles.

This from the Metropolitan Museum website describing these works:

"In 1691 Wang Hui, the leading artist of his day, was summoned to Beijing to oversee the creation of a mammoth imperial commission documenting the Kangxi emperor's southern inspection tour of 1689. The painting, consisting of twelve monumental handscrolls, is the largest pictorial work of the Qing dynasty. (The Metropolitan owns one scroll from this set; acc. no. 1979.5.) Since the finished set bears no artists' signatures or seals, it is only through group works such as the Museum's new acquisition that the identity of Wang's artistic team can be established. The album, in which four younger artists from Wang's home region practiced the methods of ancient artists, is a rare example of a master painter's having recruited assistants and shaped their style to conform to the orthodox manner, which epitomized scholarly taste at that time. This academic style became the hallmark of all later Qing court commissions.

The leaf illustrated here, Mountain Waterfall, is by Wang Hui's leading disciple, Yang Jin, who has inscribed it with a poem:

For ten days spring clouds have obscured the stream's source;
In the middle of the night a west wind brings rain to the [mountain's] foot.
But I feel the urgent thunder roar in the empty valley,
So from a distance I know that the myriad gorges are competing in their flows."

Anyone else notice the artist wrote a poem on the painting?  It is just like the carvers who added poems and sayings on many of our Mahjong tiles!

This paraphrase from the Ink Dance Chinese Paintings's website helps to explain the reliance on boats in waterscape scenes:

When painting a landscape scene featuring water, a mountain is the face, buildings on ridges are the eyes and  a fisherman in a boat is the soul. Water becomes charming when it embellishes a mountain; it becomes clear when it has buildings near it; it shows greater perspective when there are boats.

Following are examples of some boats on Mahjong tiles.

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You can see different  boats on these tiles, a sailboat and some small fishing boats.

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A sailboat from The Pung Chow Company

And a small Chinese Bakelite boat

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This beautiful screen is on view at Sothebys, for Asia Week. It dates from the late 18th to early 19th Century. Here is a somewhat blurry detail.

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You can see a similar kind of boat on these Flower tiles:

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Note also the trees along the shoreline on the screen and the tiles. On the screen detail you also see some diaper patterns just above the boat. We see those patterns on boxes, just like the one below, used as trim around the window.

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The scene above may be from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. You can see people on the top of the city wall, just as we see on some of the Empty City Tiles:

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and below from the mahjongmahjong collection

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You will see some other elements often carved into Flower tiles on this beautiful scroll, painted by Lan Ying who lived from 1585 until 1666.

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The bridge, the boat, the trees and rocks along the shoreline, all were important to Mahjong craftsmen who had a thorough knowledge of Chinese art.

 

 

 

 

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There are two main reasons this website was begun: we hope readers will develop an appreciation for the incredible skill of the men who carved and painted the designs we love so well, and wish the word would spread that these sets are truly special pieces of art. The carvers who made these sets had a great grasp of Chinese art, and used many of the inspirations around them while designing these tiny tiles.

Asia Art Week is going on in New York City this week. Collectors and dealers come from all over the world. There are fabulous pieces of art, ranging from very early pieces that are thousands of years old to Contemporary works. So far, no mahjong sets have put on display, but we're working to change that! You can see some of the pieces of art online on the Asia Week website.

These tiles have been on the website before. They are from the Bone and Ebony set on Michael Stanwick's website. Here are two photos taken of traditional Chinese landscapes that were on view at Sotheby's NY over the weekend. You will quickly see  the inspiration behind these tiny landscapes. The artist was able to capture a very restful scene on each one. The Chinese translates to wishes for longevity extending life.

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This painting was done by Dong Bangda who lived from 1699 until 1769. It is entitled: Fishing Boat on River. You can see a person in a boat, on the left about a third of the way up from the bottom, trees along the water's edge, rocks and mountains, quite like we see on the Flowers. You can also see a small pavilion on a rock, just above the boat. A pavilion is also found on two of the Flower tiles.

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This is a more recent work by Huang Binhong who lived from 1864 until 1955. The work is entitled landscape, but has much in common with the older one above and the Flower tiles. Once again we see a small boat on the water, rocks, mountains and trees.

On both paintings we see Chinese characters, not unlike the Chinese writing that accompanies the numbers on the Flower tiles.

 

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The Flowers here are flower pots with plants, each pot different one from the other. Continuing the one color look, they are all blue with only the Chinese characters painted in green and red. The designs on the pots include mountains, seen on Green 2, and some diaper patterns on Red 1, 3 and 4. The flowers include a lotus seedpod on green 4, (a lotus symbolizes purity, and the seedpod fecundity, according to Patricia Bjaaland Welch).

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These Flowers are from the hand carved Chinese Bakelite Mahjong set we saw yesterday. The top Flowers show a female musician and three other ladies, perhaps dancers with long sleeves. The Chinese symbols are those of the seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.  A wall background is carved behind these ladies, as we often see on these type of Flowers, though the author misplaced those four tiles which should read 4321 to have the wall work! The lower set are the Singapore capture tiles, the Rich Man and the Pot of Gold, and the Cat and the Mouse.

The color silver, seen above, is rare on Mahjong tiles.

Many scholars, including C.A.S. Williams and Wolfram Eberhard, acknowledge that owls were not looked upon favorably in China in the 1900s, and rather were harbingers of ill fortune and death, unlike the phoenix which is associated with good fortune. Clearly, though, the Western market did not have those thoughts about owls.

And for a bit more about the owl in early Chinese history, Ray Heaton provided us with a link to a Sotheby's article.

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2014/sakamoto-n09124/sakamoto-goro/2014/02/the-owl-in-early-chi.html

 

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Here is an excerpt I thought was interesting:

"The myth of the origin of the Shang people is found in The Book of Songs (“Heaven bade the dark bird”) . Of course, this song cannot be regarded as an original record of the Shang dynasty.  It is more likely that it was transmitted orally through the Shang into the Zhou period, with slight variations over time. In Shang and Zhou lexicography, the word xuan (black) can also be understood as “mysterious” or “divine”8,  and in Shang oracle bone inscriptions, we find a pictograph depicting a beaked owl with round eyes and plump torso, which is the name of a star, or it can be rendered as the character standing for the owl itself (Heji: 522, 11497, 11498, 11499, 11500).  In other cases, it is used together with the ancestral names Fu Gui and Fu, and  can be interpreted as “Father Gui of the Owl clan” (fig. 11) and “Lady of the Black Owl clan” (fig. 12). Thus, the evidence from Shang archaeology and historical literature render it quite possible that the Shang people believed in some mythical relationship with the owl. Liu Dunyuan has argued that the Shang people perceived the owl as the god of night and dreams, as well as the messenger between the human and the spirit world – on account of its silent flight and hunting in darkness9.  If so, this would explain why the owl is employed repeatedly in Shang ritual art and is found in a burial context, as we have seen in the examples previously discussed.

The conventional explanation is that the black bird is a swallow (yanzi). This was the view of scholars of the Han dynasty, and Han paintings and murals did indeed present the swallow as the black bird (or sun-bird, taiyangniao) and the owl as the bird of the underworld. For example, the silk funerary banner from the Mawangdui Han tomb (no. 1) depicts a black bird (swallow-like) in the sun, and an owl-like bird near the entrance of the heaven, and moreover, on left and right sides of the earth platform are two owl-on-turtle images.  Their meaning, according to Eugene Wang, is to signify “the sun setting at dusk in the west and re-emerging from the east at dawn.”10  Han ideology favored the association of the swallow with filial piety (xiao) – after all, the swallow faithfully returns every year – and the owl was conversely portrayed as an evil bird that ate its mother11.  We however do not find such opposition in the earlier period, and in Shang archaeology, while there are a few references to the swallow, the owl is clearly more prominent."

 

 

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This post features the hand carved Dragons and Flowers for the laminate mahjong set discussed on March 9 and 10.

The unusual writing style we noted on the Winds continues here on the Green Dragon which is deeply carved. The color palette continues with the gray Green Dragon and the pink Red Dragon.

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You can easily see the varied depth of the carving, most apparent on the tiles on the top row with gold paint, especially on tile 2. These images are also highly stylized. The top row features the Arts of the Scholar, and the bottom flowers.

Ray Heaton has once again provided the translations. The characters on these tiles are stylized as well, making for a translation challenge.

"We need to use a bit of knowledge of the likely characters helped by two or three which are reasonably straight forward.

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The top row are the arts of the scholar, and are versions of the simplified characters, 棋琴书画.
Qi Qin Shu Hua; chess, qin (the zither), calligraphy and painting.

The last two characters are the give away for me and are close enough to 书画 to allow all four characters to reveal themselves.

Although first two are "educated guesses", you can just about see the first character as 棋, (especially the second element of this character, 其, excluding the radical).

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Bottom row are 梅兰竹菊, Mei Lan Zhu Ju; plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum.  The second tile uses a character close to the simplified character for orchid, 兰.  I don't see what else tile three could be other than 竹, and tile four is reasonably close to the expected look of the character."

For those of you who have an ipad, ipod, iphone or android device there is an app which can be helpful with the straightforward translations of Chinese characters. It is Pleco, and it allows you to write on the screen the symbol you see, and it will translate it for you. It often seems easier, though, to guess at the word on the tile and get the Chinese character for it, and see if that character bears any resemblance to what appears on the tile.

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These hand carved Flowers are from the Chinese Bakelite Mahjong set discussed March 7th. This set came with 16 Flowers.  The top row is a courtship series, and it is completely delightful. Don't you love the details of the clothing: the high heels she is wearing, the floral arrangement on tile 3 echoing the flowers on her dress, the buttons on the man's jacket and the pleat on the front of the pants' legs? On tile 4 the woman's raised leg, poised in mid-step, adds to the fun. On tile 3 she looks out a curtain, probably expecting her suitor's arrival.

The bottom tiles introduce volleyball to the list of leisure activities we saw yesterday: tennis, swimming, and playing with swords, dogs and balloons. The girl on tile 3 seems about to hit a volleyball serve.

Once again, Ray Heaton has provided an translation.

"Top row are 花好月圓, Hua Hao Yue Yuan and literally means 'lovely flowers, round moon' but is an idiom for 'everything is wonderful' or 'conjugal bliss', the last seems to fit nicely with the tiles.  If you search Google using these characters you also find it described as 'Blooming Flowers, Full Moon'.
Second row are 青春生活, Qing Chun Sheng Huo: Qing Chun together are "Youthful" and Sheng Huo are "Activity" or "Life", so I'd expect these to translate as something along the lines "An Active Youth". "
If you want some fun, you can click here for an excerpt of the song Blooming Flowers Full Moon, or you can even buy a copy for 99 cents.

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We are all familiar with these hand carved Mahjong leisure sets. The Flowers represent what the Chinese craftsmen thought people did in their free time.

In this set it makes a difference in terms of how the tiles are arranged. They had to be laid out 4321, or else one misses the linked scenes.

These tiles show adults in the top row. The left features two ladies playing tennis, at the net; note the short socks and sneakers. And the ladies at the pool have on those long-legged swimsuits that appeared in the 1930s. Don't you love the woman caught mid-dive?

To see more of swimsuit fashion at that time, click below

http://www.fashion-era.com/swimwear.htm#1920's%20Athletic%20Tank%20Suits

The lower row shows children at play. The ballerina, the boys playing with a sword and running with a balloon, and the little girl has a dog nipping at her dress.

Ray Heaton has translated the tiles, and feels they may be Japanese in origin.

"The bottom row has the characters 逍遙快楽.  The last of these (tile #4) is a Japanese equivalent to the Chinese character 樂, hence my linking the Japanese origin.
 
The tiles say Xiaoyao Kuaile, "Free and Unfettered, happy and joyful", I'd translate this to "unrestrained joy", (or a bit more strained to "free, unfettered and full of joy").
 
The top row are 美麗健康, Mei Li Jian Kang:  Mei Li translates to "Beautiful" and Jian Kang translates as "Healthy", so we'd maybe say "Health and Beauty"."

 

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This Chinese bakelite set is backed with a black wafer. The One Bams are the peacock with two feet planted, and the other Bams are rounded. The One Dot has meanders inside, and the other Dots are floral. And the Craks have the elaborate Wan. The Dragons have the symbols for Prosperity (Green) and Center symbolizing China (Red).