A Tone of Reverence and Melancholy

The second time in two weeks I’ve been over at the Shanghai Museum.  Same routine, different group of students.  Teaching in the morning this week, rather than the afternoon.  It’s hot out.  I’ll need to drag my luggage with me over to the museum, but that’s alright.  Once I get there, I’ll have a look around and soon be on my way home as planned.  Last week it took eight or nine elevator trips to get everyone down the stairs and out on to the street.  But this week, it’s much quicker and we’re all on our way over in a flash.

I quickened my pace to enter before the large tour group following a green flag.  I went to the coat-check in with my luggage and she said that first, I must pass through security and then return.  And so now I take my place behind all the green-flaggers.  Now that I’m through security how do I get back to the coat check, I ask the grumpy lady I remember from last time.  She starts to yell something in English that isn’t clear and I ask her to speak Chinese, just to make her day a bit more grumpy than it already is.  These jobs are all necessarily all head by local Shanghainese and they are all terribly important.  I get a card to let me cut the line a second time. The woman over at the coat check couldn’t have been be more polite.

I had a blue afternoon up on the second floor with a remarkable porcelain collection they had rotated in, on display.   Refilling the Interregnum: Newly Discovered Imperial Porcelains from Zhengtong, Jingtai and Tianshun Reigns (1436-1464) of the Ming Dynasty.  From the signs I learned that pottery during this “interregnum” period of Imperial ambiguity was not marked with a clear timing of an emperor’s reign.  Not much of this particular period survived and so many of the works were damaged and displayed as repaired works. 

The room is wonderful.  One piece after another piece has this extraordinary warm, cobalt blue that sets a tone of reverence and melancholy.  China is vast enough to own all the colors of the spectrum at one time or another.  The civilization of the Yellow River is ruled now by the blood red flag of the CCP.  And this period seventy years into the Ming, (about as far as the CCP now is from its founding), appears to me to have been bluer than blue.

Later in another remarkable collection also on the same floor they had a replica of the actual kiln from the porcelain master-works at Jingdezhen.  One can’t help feeling though that there was a missed opportunity to make it more realistic and more majestic.  Quickly it feels like they settled for something adequate.  The collection at the Shanghai Museum is lovely.  But in benchmarking against, say the Edo Museum in Tokyo, which, albeit is trying to do something rather different, the gift shops, the cafes, and displays such as these trying to recreate a life-like historical feel, indeed just about anything besides the works of art themselves, the Chinese museums, still have a rather long way to go. 

Thursday, 6/6/19