Of Earth and Fire: The T.T.Tsui Collection of Chinese Art in the National Gallery of Australia

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

China is the only civilization in the world known to have a total cultural continuity from the third millennium BCE to modern times. This is the catalogue of the gift made to the National Gallery of Australia by T.T. Tsui, which consists of a collection of 31 Chinese decorative ceramic articles ranging from the Xia dynasty to the People's Republic of China. Arts and crafts have received much attention in China, hence the existence of a huge reservoir of skilled and dedicated craftsmen throughout its entire history. Chinese kings and emperors were patrons of the arts and dedicated huge resources to express the genius and ideology of their times and of their aims. Aristocrats and merchants, literati and eunuchs, wives and concubines could all be avid collectors, as of course were the royalty and the rich of Europe. All these facts have resulted in the creation and survival of the ceramics catalogued here.