The New York Times
ANTIQUES
Inspired by China
July 6, 2007
By WENDY MOONAN
The 28 pieces of studio movement furniture on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York are unlike anything seen in recent years.
In “Inspired by China: Contemporary Furnituremakers Explore Chinese Traditions,” the museum pairs works created for the exhibition by artists from America, Canada and China with 29 Chinese antiques borrowed from private collections.
To avoid confusion, the new pieces sit on the floor, while the antiques are elevated behind them. Pieces upstairs are organized by function (like seating or storage); downstairs, by pattern and design. The exhibition was organized by Nancy Berliner, a Chinese art expert at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and Edward S. Cooke Jr., a professor of decorative arts at Yale.
Two years ago, with a grant from the Fidelity Foundation, Ms. Berliner and Mr. Cooke asked 28 leading studio craftsmen to attend a workshop on Chinese furniture at the Peabody Essex Museum.
The craftsmen spent three days studying the museum’s collection of Ming and Qing dynasty antiques. They watched demonstrations of traditional Chinese joinery, an intricate system that allows furniture to be assembled and disassembled without damage. The group met and talked (often with interpreters) and then went home to produce pieces influenced by what they had seen. The resulting show opened last year in Salem and will travel to Fort Lauderdale after closing in New York on Oct. 28.
Gord Peteran, a Canadian craftsman, was taken with a 17th-century cloisonné incense stand with cabriole legs. He created a delicate “shadow” of the stand by weaving fine purple and red electrical wires together in the same shape.
Hank Gilpin, a Rhode Island woodworker, created a contemporary Chinese altar table in elm, a traditional Chinese wood.
“The altar table is the most important and iconic piece of furniture in China; it goes back to the Shang dynasty,” said Ms. Berliner.
Mr. Gilpin borrowed the basic form but anchored the top with hidden magnets so that it can be lifted off.
“The lumber came from a very large tree at Brown University, which, unfortunately but predictably, died during the construction of a research lab,” Mr. Gilpin writes in the excellent catalog. He wanted to make a piece “worthy of the tree.”
“To draw attention to this loss, he highlighted the living, organic quality of the tree by allowing a thin board with interlocked grain to dry with considerable rack and twist,” Mr. Cooke writes. “He elevated this element by placing it on a beautifully constructed base.”
Finally he painted the table red except for the feet, which are only splattered with color.
“The legs are dripping blood out of respect for the tree,” said Dorothy Globus, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design.