gems, jade, nephrite, jadeite, fei cui, China, Burma, Chinese jade carving, coral, agate, quartz, rock crystal, chalcedony, onyx, amethyst, turquoise

This catalogue documents the works selected for the 2016 China Jade Carving and Stone Carving “Tian Gong Award,” providing an extensive visual survey of contemporary Chinese jade and stone carving. Richly illustrated in color, it presents prize-winning and selected works fashioned from jade and a variety of other gem and ornamental materials, encompassing traditional figures, animals, landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, vessels, and more contemporary designs. The works demonstrate the importance placed on material quality, craftsmanship, composition, and the imaginative use of natural color, texture, skin, and irregularities in the rough. As an annual record of the Tian Gong competition, the volume documents notable artists and workshops and provides a useful overview of materials, techniques, tastes, and stylistic developments in Chinese jade and stone carving during 2016.

jade, nephrite, China, archaic jade, Khotan, Hetian, Xinjiang, gems

Zang Zhen is a professor of pre-Qin history and doctoral supervisor from the School of History and Civilization at Shaanxi Normal University. Born in 1943 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, he started his undergraduate study in the department of history at Peking University. From 1970 to 1980, he taught in rural middle schools of northern Shaanxi Province and was later admitted to Nanjing University to study pre-Qin history under the historian Liu Yuhuang. After obtaining his master’s degree, he started teaching at Shaanxi Normal University. He wrote more than 10 essays about ancient jade culture that were later collected into the book A Study and Critique on Ancient Chinese History, as well as Chinese Ancient Jade Culture, co-authored by Pan Shouyong.

jade, jadeite, fei cui, nephrite, China, Burma, Chinese jade, jade carving, gems

Selected 260 pieces of Chinese jade ware from different cultures, periods and dynasties. The Palace Museum, the Forbidden City, has a comprehensive collection of the world’s largest treasury of ancient Chinese art. The Museum is an abundant resource for anyone who is interested in Chinese painting, ceramic ware, jade ware, calligraphy, furniture, and other valuable treasures. This title offers descriptions, in chronological order, of a selected collection of 260 pieces of jade ware from different cultures, periods, and dynasties collected by the Palace Museum. The usage and history of jade objects are introduced in addition to a brief description of the design and motifs, hoping that it can help readers to have a basic understanding of the jade collection in the Palace Museum and the development of jade ware in China.

gems, jade, color, turquoise, al Biruni, color science, color theory, Broken Bangle

Surveys of color preference were among the earliest psychological experiments. Researchers have suggested that factors such as age, gender, and geographic region all influence color preference. While many studies have examined differences associated with age and gender, relatively few have focused on geographic variation, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. Early surveys revealed notable cultural differences, especially in Asia, where white was strongly preferred by Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Indonesians. More recent studies, however, have consistently found blue to be the preferred color in many countries over many years. This widespread preference has been termed the “Blue-Seven Phenomenon,” referring to Simon’s finding that participants tended to choose “blue” when asked to name a color and “seven” when asked to select a number between zero and nine. The phenomenon has since been investigated extensively across many cultures. In general, the associations underlying color preferences, and the reasons people give for liking or disliking particular colors, are closely linked to feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness. Cognitive research suggests that the amygdala plays an important role in these emotional responses, indicating that such feelings are fundamental to color preference. Based on numerous surveys, researchers have proposed a three-layer model of color preference in which feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness form the central core, individual factors comprise the second layer, and environmental influences make up the outermost layer.

gems, jade, color, turquoise, al Biruni, color science, color theory, Broken Bangle

Collates work from such fields as optics, imaging, color chemistry, industrial color, coating technologies, and color physics. Serves as an interdisciplinary reference, linking fundamental concepts of color science to applications of color. Discusses recent technological advances of color science and technology and speculates on the future of color. Assembles for the first time in one centralized work the broad interdisciplinary field of color science and technology

gems, jade, Fischer-Book

Alpine jades in the European Neolithic – The ANR-funded programmes JADE 1 (2007-2011) and JADE 2 (2013-2017) investigated the production and the extraordinary diffusion of axeheads (large and small) made of Alpine jades on a Europe-wide scale. The phenomenon began during the middle of the sixth millennium BC and ended over the course of the third millennium BC. The precious jades (jadeitite, omphacitite and fine-grained eclogite) were exploited at high altitude as well as among the torrent cones of the two Italian Alpine massifs, Mont Viso and Mont Beigua. Two technical traditions of shaping roughouts—one involving percussion, the other sawing—supplied networks of contacts that were orientated in different directions. The products travelled over much of Europe, with a few reaching central Europe and the Balkans as far as the Black Sea, moving along routes and at distances up to 1800 km as the crow flies. The authors set out here to explore the complexity of the networks over which the axeheads travelled and to attempt to account for the causes of this spatially extensive phenomenon that endured for nearly three millennia. The importance of elites’ social imagination is the best way to understand the religious systems that were in play: these systems determined that only powerful individuals were allowed to handle large Alpine axeheads, depositing them in hoards consecrated to the gods. This explanation accounts for the major phase of Alpine axehead movement that began around 4700 BC with the flow of axeheads towards Brittany and which ended around 3800–3600 BC with the arrival of axeheads in Germany, Britain and Ireland. Our hypothesis thus stands in stark contrast with the commonly-held (and unsubstantiated) view of some geologists that Alpine axeheads were made from flat cobbles taken from torrent beds and that they moved, as ordinary prestige goods, in a ‘down-the-line’ fashion. Our hypothesis offers a new perspective on Neolithic societies in western Europe, seeing them as inegalitarian in nature, with epicentres in Brittany and the Paris Basin. These two regions had a mythology that featured jade axeheads as being male symbols.

gems, jade, archaic jade, China, Chinese jade carving, nephrite, art collecting in China

Ching presents the personal collection Hong Kong collector Kevin Ching, of Chinese jade carvings assembled around the playful theme of a “private circus.” The bilingual catalogue emphasizes works depicting animals, performers, amusing figures, and other lively or whimsical subjects, reflecting the collector’s individual taste rather than attempting a comprehensive historical survey of jade. The carvings demonstrate the imagination of Chinese lapidaries in exploiting the natural shape, color, texture, and markings of the stone to create expressive miniature sculptures. Through carefully selected objects and illustrations, the collection highlights humor, movement, personality, and visual invention in jade carving, while offering an unusually personal approach to collecting and appreciating Chinese jade. Comes in a slipcase textured to resemble the surface of rough jade. Extremely rare.

gems, jade, nephrite, New Zealand nephrite, Maori nephrite

From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, the Bohemian immigrant artist Gottfried Lindauer travelled to marae and rural towns around New Zealand and – commissioned by Maori and Pakeha – captured in paint the images of key Maori figures. For Maori then and now, the faces of tupuna are full of mana and life. Now this definitive book on Lindauer’s portraits of the ancestors collects that work for New Zealanders. The book presents 67 major portraits and 8 genre paintings alongside detailed accounts of the subject and work, followed by essays by leading scholars that take us inside Lindauer and his world: from his artistic training in Bohemia to his travels around New Zealand as Maori and Pakeha commissioned him to paint portraits; his artistic techniques and deep relationship with photography; Henry Partridge’s gallery of Lindauer works on Queen Street in Auckland where Maori visited to see their ancestors; and the afterlife of the paintings in marae and memory. Published in association with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. For collectors, this book was printed with four different dust jackets.

jade, jadeite, fei cui, omphacite, pyroxene jade, Europe, Spain, gems

The discovery of a Neolithic Alpine jade axehead in Aroche, in the southwest of Spain, revives the question of long-distance exchange between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. This polished blade belongs to a typological model quite characteristic of Alpine production during the second half of the 5th millennium B.C. Different mineralogical approaches (macroscopic features examination, specific gravity, direct XRD, non-destructive μXRF spectroscopy, optical stereomicroscopy, magnetic susceptibility determination and microprobe analysis) have identified the rock as an omphacitic jadeitite (mixed jade) with some tiny garnets and a weak retromorphosis. This analysis and the comparison of the rock structure with the referential JADE of Alpine natural jade samples, as well as the extraction modalities and shaping of the axe, provide strong arguments to assign the Aroche axe to a production of Mont Viso: the origin of thousands of axes that circulated in Europe between Ireland and Sicily. The Aroche axe, discovered not far from the variscite mines of Encinasola, could be considered as part of a possible exchange system between the Iberian Peninsula and the Gulf of Morbihan, in Brittany.

jade, nephrite, China, Chinese art, modern Chinese jade carving, gems