“Celestial Beings and Bird-Men: Human Flight in Chinese Jade” by Angus Forsyth

Contemporary books about jade tend to be museum or collector’s catalogs. Seeking to establish their credibility, and assuming little knowledge on the part of the reader, they typically begin with timelines, material analysis, and the establishment of provenance using comparisons to photographs in other compilations, especially from primary excavations. As a result, they often have all the charm of dental work. Angus Forsyth, among the greatest and most ambitious collectors of Chinese jade, has taken a different tack.

Although his personal collection is encyclopedic in scope, and the book is essentially a catalog of one small part of it, Forsyth has taken strong verticals from his portfolio that speak to armchair travelers, not just art historians or fellow collectors. In his first book of this type, Ships of the Silk Road: The Bactrian Camel in Chinese Jade), Forsyth used 75 camel miniatures from his collection, all but five made of nephrite jade, to show how Chinese craftsmen reflected the cultures of their far west. Jade was a major import from present-day Xinjiang, most of it carried on camel-back, the “ships” of the Silk Road and the title. Both nephrite jade—the only type of jade known to the Chinese before the 17th century—and the camels that carried it in loads of pebbles or boulders represented the exotic far west to the Han Chinese, clustered in the fertile central plains of north and eastern China from early times.

Chinese images of winged or floating creatures came from far to the west of the Middle Kingdom, from winged figures of potentates in Mesopotamia to Greek and Hellenistic gods and goddesses, and from Christian angels.

Forsyth’s Ships used the familiar to illuminate the unfamiliar, with the Silk Road representing the familiar, and jade, one of the least known Chinese arts outside China, the unfamiliar. In Celestial Beings and Bird-men, Forsyth takes this approach a step further, assuming an instinctive curiosity about flight that links East and West. He argues that Chinese images of winged or floating creatures, like the raw material of jade itself, began their history from afar. “The initial concepts behind these representations did not arise in China,” he writes. Instead, they came from far to the west of the Middle Kingdom, from winged figures of potentates in Mesopotamia to Greek and Hellenistic gods and goddesses, and from Christian angels—a word that embedded itself in Romance languages from the Greek angelos for messenger—to the fearful figure of the bird-legged, winged harpy of Greek legend.

By the time these images arrived in China, they were already transformed into Buddhist acolytes and boddhisattvas—the airborne apsaras, or feitian in Chinese; bird-men or kinnaras, with wings and bird legs; and garudas with bird heads and human bodies. These are present in iconography across the Buddhist and Hindu world—there are nearly 5,000 representations of apsaras in the Mogao cave paintings at the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) monastic and military post at Dunhuang in Gansu Province, and many more in Buddhist grottos from Sri Lanka to the Ajanta and Ellora monastic complexes in Maharashtra state in India, to Longmen in Henan Province and Yungang in Shanxi Province. Human-scale kinnaras stand guard at the entrance to the Bangkok National Museum. A fourth category in Forsyth’s menagerie of winged and air-borne creatures, anthropomorphized bird ornaments possibly used in head dresses or hats, have no Buddhist, let alone Christian or Greek antecedents, and are most likely Taoist or shamanistic in inspiration.

The images of beings with the power of flight became very different in the hands of Chinese artisans, and while Forsyth takes readers along with his own travels and views of angels, harpies, and winged beings from Byzantium to Bulgaria, these merely serve as an introduction to his collection of jade sculptures. All told, Celestial Beings and Bird-men includes 366 photographs or drawings, most by the author, with images of 140 objects from his collection including 55 apsaras, 28 kinnaras, seven garudas and 35 hat ornaments. Like his 75 jade camels, it is extraordinary for any collector to have amassed so many pieces of such spectacular quality in one vertical, or at least four closely related, rare categories of jade sculpture, including the evocative and playful apsaras, the closest cousins to Western angels.

The apsaras, by convention, are descended from water nymphs and nearly always female, and have roots in Taoist images of flying beings dating from the Han period (206 BCE-220 CE). They almost never have wings, while the squat, troll-like kinnaras and rare garudas in jade, invariably winged, are anything but lissome and graceful. The hat ornaments with their beaks and bird legs evoke ancient, shamanistic images of birds and supernatural creatures from China’s Neolithic period, particularly the Hongshan culture (4700-2900 BCE). Most of the hat ornaments date to the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368 CE) while the jade apsaras are dated to as early as the Six Dynasties (220-589 CE). Forsyth admits that these dates are “posited” or inexact but has also worked with a curator at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Xu Xiaodong, to corroborate his informed guesswork.

By the time Chinese craftsmen tackled the celestial images of Buddhism in jade, from the Six Dynasties onward, they had already shifted in form and scale—from large-scale architectural features like the 5.6 meter, second-century BCE Winged Victory of Samothrace to the tiny jade apsaras that can easily be carried in the palm of the hand, ranging in size from 5-10 cm. The book demands careful attention to the caption descriptions, especially to scale, in order to appreciate the craftsmanship and charm of the figures, which are almost always smaller than the images on the page. While the winged creatures of Western myth and religion were designed to impress and to be seen from a distance, their distant Chinese relatives in jade were intimate and personal in their uses, whether for meditation or aesthetic pleasure.

The warmth and smoothness of the stone are not apparent in typical display settings behind museum glass.

Celestial Beings and Bird-Men: Human Flight in Chinese Jade, Angus Forsyth (Philip Wilson Publishers, December 2020)
Celestial Beings and Bird-Men: Human Flight in Chinese Jade, Angus Forsyth (Philip Wilson Publishers, December 2020)

Collectors of Chinese jade sculpture have a problem when it comes to sharing their passion. Despite the sublime colors of the material, the sensual, even erotic touch of its surface, the beauty and rich variety of the sculptures themselves, and their deep connection with every phase of Chinese culture going back to the Neolithic, outside China, jade is known mainly as a gemstone. Explanations get in the way of appreciation when it comes to the sculptural production in nephrite jade that begins with some of China’s earliest cultures, like the Hongshan. There is a very long learning curve in jade, to be sure, and most exhibition and collection catalogs assume ignorance and end up repeating much the same information.

Celestial Being and Bird-men is kind to the reader in this respect. Relying on his story of air-borne icons and the strength of his collection, he forgoes much of the introductory material that makes most jade catalogs seem repetitive. All the same, some advance knowledge is helpful. “Jade 101” begins with what makes sculpture in jade different from much more plastic materials used in Chinese art such as soapstone, bamboo, or (no longer permitted by international convention to protect endangered species) elephant ivory or rhinoceros horn. The first counter-intuitive factoid is that jade sculptures are not actually sculpted, at least not in the conventional sense, which implies carving, chiseling, even casting. Instead, jade is painstakingly modeled using quartz or diamond sand to abrade and polish the surface, from river pebbles or boulders extracted from mines. This is due to the hardness of the nephrite material used in virtually all jade sculpture up to the 17th century and beyond (although less hard than the jadeite gemstone, 6-6.5 on the Moh’s scale versus 6.5 to 7 for jadeite). The material also makes it virtually impossible to date jade works of art unless they are extracted from a tomb or other archeological site under supervision.

Nephrite has been prized in China for millennia, while the harder, often bright green jadeite, largely from Myanmar, was little used until the 17th century when parts of Myanmar came under Chinese control. The high polish of jade objects was time consuming (prior to the invention of electric drills) and took as much skill as the roughing out of the boulders themselves. The final shape often depends on the form of the pebble or boulder, and cracks and discolorations in the stone itself. The artisan works from the outside in, planning and visualizing the final shape with extreme care due to the value of the material itself.

These are not products of individual artists or craftsmen but of teams and workshops. In the history of jade production, only one artisan, Lu Zigang, is known to have signed his works, and many of the works that bear his name are copies or fakes. Lu lived towards the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE) and was among a number of master craftsmen in jade operating out of the great jade hub of Suzhou who reached the pinnacle of their trade. But with superlative skills went a degree of arrogance. Among other stories told about Lu is that the pride that led him to sign his works—as craftsmen did in other mediums than jade under the explosion of brilliant craft workshops in the Ming —led him to engrave his name on a dragon’s head sculpture for the Longqing Emperor (reigned 1567-1572), an act of lèse-majesté. The emperor had him executed forthwith.

The warmth and smoothness of the stone are not apparent in typical display settings behind museum glass. And while jade played significant roles in Mayan and Maori cultures, it was virtually unknown in Europe before the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Its English name comes from the Spanish piedra de ijada, or “flank stone” because of its ostensible uses in curing loin and kidney ailments, so named by explorers who saw the Mayans and Aztecs holding it to their sides to cure ills. “Nephrite” is the Latin equivalent of the Spanish, lapis nephriticus.

The hand feel of jade evokes sensory comparisons closer to the language of wine-tasting than conventional descriptions of visual art.

Jade is notoriously difficult to photograph, both because of the translucence of the stone and the range of colors, which defy the best professional photographers; Forsyth has used his own photographs throughout, and the resolution of some of his photographs is less sharp than might be desired. In the hand, jade both captures light and transmits it and has tactile qualities; objects that may seem brown and drab in photographs change color when held up to the light and are far more vibrant in natural light than the artificial lighting of museum cases. The Chinese lexicon of jade colors, like the Inuit words for snow, explores a range at the edge of Western perception. Collectors appreciate not only the subtle gradations of color but also the instability of color and surface that came with the passionate affections of their owners.

In a book or museum, jade is inaccessible to the sense of touch; collectors and curators are fortunate in being able to handle jade, in the manner of the original owners. The hand feel of jade evokes sensory comparisons closer to the language of wine-tasting than conventional descriptions of visual art. Unlike Western art forms—other than jewelry—jade was often kept close to the person, in deep pockets or tied to belts. Many pieces have slightly oily skins and color shifts, as a result of handling and fondling. In some periods of Chinese history, elaborate assemblages of jade plaques were draped over royal and aristocratic personages to reflect their status in life and death. The most common usage of Forsyth’s celestial beings would have been as objects for contemplation by scholars on their desks or to keep on their persons and discreetly fondle as they carried out their days and nights.

 

Forsyth aims high in this book, asking what lies behind the human fascination with images of flight. Instead of psychological analysis, he turns to images and their migrations and distant connections to tell the story.

In the West, angelology, the study of angels, fell apart after the Protestant Reformation, when medieval theologians were mocked for their obsession with counting the number of angels on the heads of pins. Yet popular culture, like the Netflix series Lucifer, featuring archangels and devils with sexy chests and wings, or for that matter Superman and a whole flock of Marvel superheroes, defies post-Reformation rationalism.

In Celestial Beings and Bird-men, Forsyth intrigues us with a winged and floating pantheon that speaks to the Chinese imagination, and our own. This marvelous book serves not only as a tantalizing introduction to the art of jade, but will evoke jealousy and admiration in fellow collectors and curators.


Edith Terry is a writer and author based in Hong Kong.