Collecting bric-a-brac, pretty knick-knacks, things that gather dust on the mantelpiece can become something of an obsession -- and when it does, it is seen by museums and galleries as a great and good thing. The rows of ornate snuff bottles that are lined up on the fourth floor of the National Museum of History (NMH) do little to elucidate the reason behind this twist of logic. Neither did James Li, the owner of the J&J collection of snuff bottles, who was at the NMH last Tuesday to open the exhibition.
The inspiration for the collection was Li's wife, a lover a small things. As a scion of a KMT diplomatic family serving in Europe and the US, Li was in a good position to collect products dispersed by war and civil unrest within China, bringing together one of the world's most highly regarded private collections of snuff bottles in the world.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NMH
"In the days when the collection was mostly being put together, fakes were relatively rare," Li said. "Now you must be very careful, for originals are very hard to come by." The importance of the collection is highlighted by the large number of snuff bottles originally intended for imperial use, which are the "most desirable collectibles," though not necessarily the most beautiful or artistically interesting.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NMH
One of the most interesting aspects of the snuff bottle craze, an object that seems particularly Chinese, is that the use of snuff was originally introduced from Europe. That it took off in a big way in China is not in doubt, and the little containers used to store this mild narcotic became a subject for some of the miniaturists' greatest work. Painting on the inside of these tiny glass bottles will always remain a representation of a superfluity of artistic talent put to insignificant use -- a thought it is hard to banish looking at the 417 items laid out in this exhibition.
Virtually every kind of material ever used to make a snuff bottle is represented, including semiprecious nephrite, lacquer, enamel on a variety of materials, many different kinds of glass and organic materials such as bamboo and bone. The designs range from the extremes of elaborate ornamentation -- nine intertwined lions twined over a bottle just 6.3cm high with two distinct levels of carving -- to bottles using the natural grain of their materials to create patterns stunning in their abstract simplicity -- a bottle carved from sandstone, a swirl pattern made by a cross-section of a fossilized shell.
Given the delicate beauty of the individual objects, it is unfortunate that greater care has not been taken with the presentation of the objects. Explanations are not aligned with the objects they describe, and the bottles themselves sometimes seem to be laid out in a haphazard line. This hardly does justice to the extravagant amounts of time and effort that the creation of the individual snuff bottles so obviously consumed.
The saddest thing about these items, like so many collected knick-knacks is that these snuff bottles where collected for display rather than use, so despite their beauty, they lack a degree of human warmth, which to this viewer at least, made the exhibition somewhat anemic.
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