Fully Furnished Life

The dream of every collector - finding an unrecognised valuable antique in a farmhouse somewhere in rural China - has been very unlikely for more than twenty years and is now next to impossible. So as this natural shortage of Ming "Scholarly" and Qing "Court" furniture pushes auction prices through the stratosphere (pieces can fetch over US$1 million), who and what will feed the growing demand for this distinct and classical furniture? The traditional answer has been copies.

Already a successful collector of antique furniture, and in demand to write catalogue descriptions for Christies and Sotheby's, Tian Jiaqing wanted more than copies. He was intrigued by connections he saw between other arts (such as calligraphy and music) of the Ming and Qing and their furniture styles. "I decided I had to do more research, so of course I took myself, first of all, to the great libraries of the Forbidden City," recollects Master Tian.  After some time, and a lot of work in dusty archives, even ancient sketches and drawings of other subjects that featured furniture began to inform Master Tian's research. He began to find connections and develop ideas that he wanted to test firsthand, the only way possible. Eight years ago he began to design and create his own masterpieces, inspired most of all by the "Scholarly Furniture" styles of the Ming Dynasty.

According to Master Tian, Ming Furniture is guided by three fundamental ideas:

"It's a system that produces very little waste. It's a philosophy that states just enough is enough. It also became my personal guiding principle," says Master Tian. It's a philosophy that has taken him a long way from the early days, all the way to becoming the Secretary General of the Chinese National Classical Furniture Association. Not to mention his successful business both restoring genuine Ming and Qing antique furniture, and creating classic new designs in the Ming style.

During the Ming Dynasty, the designers of "Scholarly Furniture" were, as the name suggests, highly educated individuals. "The proportions of a true Ming-style piece of furniture are exact and artistic. It's actually a deceptively simple style, but the proportions are really very exacting," says Master Tian, "it's about a harmony of shape. Often I explain it by comparing the furniture to Chinese characters. It's very hard to say why a calligrapher's work is just so much more pleasing to the eye than anyone else's. They're all characters - they can all be read - yet as soon as you see the real artist's work, you know. It's the same with the "Scholarly" Ming designs. In fact, sometimes the designers actually were calligraphers in their own right.  "This is the problem with mere copies of Ming work. There is no artistic knowledge that backs up the copy. It's an art, not a science. You simply can't measure up a piece of Ming furniture and make another one - you have to understand it as a piece of art first. My works are not copies, they are independent artworks in the Ming tradition."

Asked about Qing Court furniture, and Master Tian is equally informative, but it's easy to see that his heart is elsewhere. "There are fascinating aspects to Qing furniture, like the little-known fact that both Western and Eastern artisans worked together inside the Forbidden City to create it under the supervision of the Emperors themselves in the early and middle dynasty period. It's very different to the Ming styles. Qing furniture focuses on cementing the legitimacy of their rule, on displaying their power," expounds Master Tian. He explains that the craftsmanship is still of an extremely high level, and some of the materials are very valuable and quite extraordinary, but that function is definitely secondary to form, unless you accept that the primary function of furniture is pure display!

Looking over photos of some of Master Tian's own favourite work, Beijing This Month was struck by a peculiar feature in quite a number of his Ming pieces: they seem to be able to be disassembled and flat-packed. Tongue firmly in cheek, BTM asks Master Tian if ancient Ming furniture was flat-pack as well, like so much modern furniture is, and we were astonished at his response. "Ming furniture is often quite big, and as you know. It was often produced in the south, and if you build a huge table to flat pack, not only can you transport it more easily, but you can also move it through a much smaller doorway and assemble it inside," Master Tian informs us. We can't help thinking that this must be where IKEA got the idea.  "But that isn't the raison d'étre for this style of construction," Master Tian is keen to point out, "the real reasons are stylistic and philosophic. Ming designers felt that the use of nails was just too easy, too simple, and in typical Ming style, the joinery itself became an artwork within an artwork. Also, the wood itself has personality and life. The joinery pieces were seen as part of a family. So much so that matching the two sides of a joint was called renjia, or 'recognizing home'."

In closing we asked Master Tian to share with us what inspired him in the creative process. Was it calligraphy, like the Ming scholars of old? Or classical poetry? "I spend at least three hours a day listening to music," Master Tian admits, "I love both Western classical and Chinese classical music. They are my greatest inspiration. I tell all of my apprentices the same thing - if you want to excel in art you must be a broad artist - you must be like the Ming scholars who first created this style.

"I follow Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati - and other conductors, mostly from the '50s and '60s. They produced classical music that was full of passion and spirit, but was also extremely strict, intelligent and rigorous in its execution. My hope is that my furniture reflects a spiritual connection to this music. I think that's very important if you're a working artist, to find examples in other art forms of what you are trying to create in your own art. I don't want to create copies. I want to create new artworks. And so to achieve that I must look far outside the usual 'grouping' of arts like calligraphy and architecture to find inspiration."

Being privileged to have seen several of Master Tian's works close-up, we at BTM feel compelled to add that whatever his inspiration, it's obviously working just fine.

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Tian Jiaqing was born in 1953, and is a dedicated scholar of Chinese culture and a world-famous Chinese antique specialist. He has published widely in the field, with articles appearing in many Chinese and US publications, and several books on the subject. His "Classic Chinese Furniture of the Qing Dynasty" is widely regarded as the most comprehensive and authoritative study of the subject to date. Since 1998, he has taught expert classes on Chinese furniture at Beijing University, and has been creating original furniture in the Ming style since 1996.