ABSTRACT
T h e r e has never been any appreciation in China of the Sculptor's Art. Hardly any serious recognizance of the objects themselves was made before the eighteenth century, and even then it was probably more the association of his tory and the antiquity of inscriptions which interested the connoisseur. This is surprising in a country where the knowledge and cultivation of art has always been one of the essential parts of educated life. But this lack of apprecia tion becomes more obvious if one considers the small part played by the human figure in Chinese sculpture. With the exception of the group of earthenware statuettes used in the burial rites of the Han and T ‘ang Dynasties, in which a lively naturalism is shown akin to that of the Tanagra figurines of Ancient Greece, the figure sculpture of China is confined to religious subjects in which, for the most part, the conception depends for emotional effect on facial expres sion and the drapery follows a stylistic or conventional pattern and is divorced from any close relationship with the body, while in the body itself naturalistic modelling is con spicuously absent. There is nothing in Chinese art to com pare with the admirable portrait statues of the Japanese mediaeval sculptors, but if in the representation of the human form the Chinese canons are noticeably different from European, in their animal sculpture they can be readily appreciated. Here form, whether naturalistic or stylized, is far closer to European standards and the beauty of many of these animal conceptions has a sculptural value far in excess of the best of the religious figures.
