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Chinese Furniture: A Renaissance

Of the various art forms to evolve in China, among them porcelain, lacquer and calligraphy, furniture craft was perhaps the least appreciated and the last to be collected. Now, carpenters, unsung heroes who once toiled anonymously in workshops, are venerated as true artisans whose masterpieces are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, these talented craftsmen elevated furniture from the realm of functional to the realm of philosophical. By artfully incorporating wood grain patterns, experimenting with spatial dimensions, and innovating new forms of joinery, simple and pure tables and chairs came to represent something higher: the harmony and union between man and nature.

The best furniture on the market is animated. Enthusiasts look for dynamism and movement in the gentle curves and sweeps of the spandrels, aprons, braces and feet. Analogies range from lotus flowers to elephant trunks.

The appreciation of Chinese furniture on an international scale began in the 1930s when a group of American and European scholars living in Beijing and Shanghai started collecting fine antiques. Before the Communists seized power in 1949, much of the furniture owned by these scholars was spirited out of the country and into the US where they would later form the basis of major museum collections in Kansas City, Philadelphia and New York. For decades, as Red China remained closed, it was commonly believed that these museum artifacts were all that remained of Ming and early Qing dynasty furniture. They were considered the remnants of a lost culture that elevated carpentry to a high art. This assumption was, of course, wrong. In the backwaters of China, in isolated provinces such as Anhui and Shanxi, spectacular examples were gathering dust. While the country endured paroxysms of social change, scholars like Wang Shixiang were quietly scouring the Beijing markets in search of classical Ming-style furniture. During the Communist Revolution, he unearthed dozens of examples, disassembled them with the help of Beijing craftsmen, and compiled notes of his findings. It was a labor of love that was almost derailed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) when symbols of supposedly bourgeois conceit were confiscated and destroyed. Once coveted, Ming and Qing furniture became a symbol of loathing. During the Cultural Revolution, when chaos ruled and aesthetic beauty was derided, thousands of exquisite pieces were thrown into piles on the streets and burned or shipped in pieces to collection warehouses. The oral tradition of Chinese carpentry was threatening classical furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties with extinction. Even during these darkest hours, however, pieces survived. Some were simply too far removed in the countryside to be directly affected by the tumult. Others survived because they were rescued by academics or conscientious Red Guards who ignored destruction orders and hoarded choice pieces in their homes after they were dumped into warehouses. After the Cultural Revolution, there was some attempt at restitution. Wang Shixiang’s stash was eventually returned to him and his collection donated to the Shanghai Museum after it was purchased by Quincy Chuang in Hong Kong. Much of the furniture stored in the warehouses, however, was simply sold off.

Fig. 1 Kai-Yin Lo has decorated her home with Chinese antique furniture such as this rose chair and window screen from Anhui province.

Fig. 2 The Kang family manor in Henan province was constructed in the late nineteenth century. The home escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution because it was used for education rallies. It was later restored in the 1990s, and this large canopy bed, which once belonged to the house, was pulled out of storage and reinstalled in the bedroom of the last surviving matriarch.

Fig. 3 Dual compound cabinets frame two southern official’s hat chairs in Kai-Yin Lo’s Hong Kong apartment. Furniture that survived destruction during the Cultural Revolution in China has become de rigeur in the homes of the wealthy.

By the mid-1980s, as China’s new economic policy kicked into gear, antique furniture began flooding out of China and inevitably surfaced around Hong Kong’s famous “Cat Street.” Dealers and collectors who recognized their worth snapped them up, including published collectors like Peter Fung, Robert Piccus, Mimi Hung and Dr Shing Yiu Yip. While most transactions occurred privately, the growing popularity of Chinese furniture became patently obvious when a 1996 auction at Christie’s Hong Kong netted US$11.2 million—the highest total for an individual collection of Chinese art in a decade. The benchmark for individual items has been repeatedly surpassed.

The trend will probably continue as China’s new rich rediscover their past. China’s emerging art aficionados, such as Zhao Ping, a Beijing entrepreneur, are part of a new wave rekindling the Chinese passion for collecting objets d’art. He says, “I believe collecting can help me learn about Chinese history”—something he did not have time to appreciate in school when he was studying electronics. A new Cultural Revolution is transforming the market. Antique Chinese furniture is entering a period of renaissance.

Fig. 4 Southern official’s hat chair with a non-protruding crest rail, huanghuali. Photo courtesy Robert A. Piccus.

Fig. 5 A petite rose chair with scrolling grass pattern carved in relief on the apron, huanghuali, eighteenth century, North China. This chair is unusual because it lacks a backrest. Photo courtesy Peter Fung.

Fig. 6 Interior of Cola Ma’s home in the city of Tianjin. Most of the furniture is from Shanxi province, a specialty of Ma, who has become an expert in softwood or vernacular furniture.

Fig. 7 The “Hall of Benevolence,” the principal formal room of the Shen family home in Luzhi, Jiangsu province, built in 1870. Typical of late Qing-dynasty residences, the room is richly ornamented with furniture, paneling, latticework, paintings and calligraphy.