Draft:Dry lacquer

Portrait of the monk Ganjin at Tōshōdai-ji, Nara: a hollow dry-lacquer sculpture, 80.1 cm high, thought to have been completed in 763

Dry lacquer is a technique in which layers of cloth soaked in lacquer form the body of a sculpture or vessel. In Chinese it is known as jiazhu (simplified Chinese: 夹苎; traditional Chinese: 夾紵; pinyin: jiāzhù), a term that roughly means binding layers of hemp together; in Japanese it is called kanshitsu (乾漆). The English name probably refers to the powdered fillers added to the lacquer, which make it less fluid and easier to model.

Two main structures are used: a hollow construction, in which the cloth and lacquer shell is built over a clay core that is removed before the work is finished, and a wood-core construction, in which a carved wooden body remains inside. Hollow figures are comparatively light, which suited images meant to be carried.

The first records of lacquer Buddhist images in China describe work of the mid-fourth century, and surviving Chinese examples date from the sixth century onward. In Japan the technique is preserved from the seventh century and was widely used in the Nara period (710–794).

Terminology

Japanese sources distinguish dakkatsu kanshitsu (脱活乾漆) for hollow work from mokushin kanshitsu (木心乾漆) for work over a retained wooden core.

Chinese usage has changed over time. Modern writers often call cloth-bodied lacquerware tuotai (脱胎, "removed core"). Excavation inventories of the Warring States period and the Western Han do not, however, use the word jiazhu for such objects; a related term, xiazhu (侠纻), appears in the Eastern Han, so the ancient and modern senses of these names should not be equated. Later sources also use tuosha (脱纱) and tuanhuan (抟换). The tradition of Tiantai County, Zhejiang, is called ganqi jiazhu (干漆夹苎) and uses ramie cloth, whereas the cloth identified in early surviving sculptures examined scientifically was hemp.

Materials and technique

Hollow dry-lacquer Buddha, probably Amitābha, China, early 7th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art

East Asian lacquer is the sap of the lacquer tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum. The raw sap is toxic and can cause severe contact dermatitis. Each applied layer needs a temperature of about 20–28 °C and high relative humidity, for which more than about 65 percent is best, and must harden before the next is added, so a single object takes many weeks of work.

The maker first builds a core. Strips of plain-woven cloth are dipped in lacquer and laid over it piece by piece, in some places up to six layers deep; the cloth gives the brittle dried lacquer strength and flexibility. Drapery folds and other details are modelled with lacquer thickened by fillers. In hollow work the clay core and its internal armature are then removed, although wooden braces may be left inside. The surface is finished with paint and gilding.

A study of four Chinese dry-lacquer Buddhist sculptures of the sixth to eighth centuries, using X-radiography, computed tomography, microscopy and chemical analysis, found that all four were built on plain-woven hemp cloth and that the commonest filler in the lacquer was ground, partly burnt bone, identified as animal rather than human in the two sculptures analysed for species; traces of blood proteins were also detected. Each sculpture began with coarse lacquer layers followed by finer ones. One Buddha has a core of twelve joined pieces of wood; the other three were formed over clay cores that were removed, and clay still accessible inside the bodhisattva head allowed its core to be studied. Two hollow Buddhas weigh about 13.6 kg (30 lb) each, while the wood-core figure weighs more than twice as much. The same techniques and materials recur across the group, which the authors take to indicate workshops with imperial or elite support.

In the Tiantai tradition the materials include ramie, raw lacquer, powdered old tile, volcanic ash, tung oil and cinnabar, and the work is described as 48 stages ending in polishing and gilding.

History

China

Lacquer vessels with cloth bodies have been excavated from middle and late Warring States tombs in Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Jiangsu, and are also known in numbers from the Han dynasty.

Sixth- and seventh-century texts record that in the mid-fourth century Dai Kui (died 395) made five now-lost "portable" Buddhist images, once displayed at Waguan Temple in present-day Nanjing; the description as portable suggests hollow construction. The earliest written evidence for lacquer as a medium for Buddhist images is Kumārajīva's 406 translation of the Lotus Sutra, the first version of that text to list it.

The earliest surviving Chinese examples date from the sixth to eighth centuries and include a wood-core Buddha of about 590 in the Walters Art Museum, described by the museum as the oldest known Chinese example of its type, and hollow Buddhas in the National Museum of Asian Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An account of the Yuan-dynasty sculptor Liu Yuan describes images made by wrapping cloth and lacquer around a clay form, which was removed once the lacquer had hardened. Dry-lacquer figures also furnished later palace chapels: the Great Buddha Hall of the Cining Palace in the Forbidden City held dry-lacquer Buddhas of the Three Times, guardian figures and eighteen arhats between about 1.5 and 1.6 m tall, which were moved to the White Horse Temple in Luoyang in 1973; the palace historian Wang Jiapeng dates the arhats to the early Ming dynasty.

Writing in 1927, Helen Fernald of the Penn Museum described three variants of the process and stated that the technique declined in China in the ninth century before being revived under the Yuan. In Fuzhou, bodiless lacquerware using cloth or wooden moulds developed from the work of Shen Shao'an in the Qing dynasty and became a prominent regional tradition of vessels and decorative objects.

Japan

Wood-core dry-lacquer Thousand-armed Kannon, Tōshōdai-ji, Nara period

The earliest preserved Japanese examples of hollow dry lacquer are seventh-century figures of the guardians of the four directions at Taima-dera in Nara. In the eighth century the technique was widely used in the ateliers of imperial temples such as Tōdai-ji and Tōshōdai-ji. Notable works include:

• the Ashura at Kōfuku-ji, dated 734 and 153.4 cm (60.4 in) tall, a hollow figure; computed tomography has revealed another face modelled beneath the visible one;
• the portrait of Ganjin at Tōshōdai-ji, a National Treasure and the oldest portrait sculpture in Japan, 80.1 cm (31.5 in) high and thought to have been completed in 763. The temple and Japanese heritage sources state that his disciple Ninki directed the work, while a Chinese heritage source names another disciple, Situo. Analysis found that the hemp cloth came from worn clothing;
• the Thousand-armed Kannon in the Golden Hall of Tōshōdai-ji, a wood-core work designated a National Treasure.

The technique fell out of use in the following Heian period (794–1185), when wood became the preferred material for sculpture.

Modern practice

In 2006 the Tiantai dry-lacquer-and-ramie craft was placed on the first national list of the intangible cultural heritage of China, as item VIII-53. The listing describes its uses in Buddhist sculpture, architectural decoration and the restoration of old buildings and objects, and notes a shortage of young practitioners and the substitution of synthetic materials in some workshops.

Tang Chunfu (born 1952) is listed as a national representative transmitter of the Tiantai craft. He began learning it at the age of eleven from Shi Guanghong, a monk-artisan of Huading Temple on Tiantai Mountain. The craft had been passed on mainly by oral instruction; according to a 2013 news report, from the 1980s Tang and his apprentices spent more than a decade testing its traditional materials and set the work out as 48 stages and 168 operations. A figure of Shakyamuni Buddha that he made in 1991 is in the collection of the Nanjing Museum. In 1999 his 3.46 m (11.4 ft) Thousand-armed Guanyin took first place among the gold awards at the national "Century Cup" arts and crafts exhibition and, according to Chinese press reports, was then acquired by the Palace Museum in Beijing. In 2019 he was named a vice-chair of the newly founded Lacquer Art Inheritance and Development Alliance, and a dry-lacquer work of his opened the alliance's first touring exhibition.

Training has also moved into art schools. A National Arts Fund project on jiazhu sculpture, run by Anhui Normal University, combined theory, lectures by practitioners including Tang, field study and studio work, and closed with an exhibition and seminar reported in January 2020.

Selected surviving works

Dates follow current collection or temple records. A catalogue entry reading "dry lacquer" does not by itself identify the fibre used.

Work	Date	Structure	Collection
Buddha	c. 590	Lacquer over a core of twelve joined pieces of wood	Walters Art Museum, U.S. 25.9
Seated Buddha	Late 6th–early 7th century	Hollow, hemp cloth and lacquer	National Museum of Asian Art U. S.
Buddha, probably Amitabha	Early 7th century	Hollow, with polychromy and gilding	Metropolitan Museum of Art, U. S. 19.186
Bodhisattva	700s	Hollow dry lacquer	Cleveland Museum of Art, U.S. 1983.86
Portrait of Ganjin	8th century	Hollow, coloured surface	Tōshōdai-ji, Japan.
Seated Guanyin	Late 14th–15th century	Dry lacquer	Walters Art Museum, 25.256

See also

• Lacquerware
• Japanese lacquerware
• Chinese Buddhist sculpture
• Japanese sculpture

Further reading

• Strahan, Donna; McCarthy, Blythe, eds. (2023). Research on Early Chinese Lacquer Buddhas: Proceedings of the Sixth Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art. Archetype Publications. doi:10.5479/10088/116413. ISBN 9781909492943.
• Chang, Julie; Schilling, Michael R. (2016). "Reconstructing lacquer technology through Chinese classical texts". Studies in Conservation. 61 (sup3): 38–44. doi:10.1080/00393630.2016.1227115.

Category:Lacquerware Category:Sculpture techniques Category:Buddhist sculpture Category:Buddhist art