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Lot Essay
Throughout Asia, board games like parchisi, majong, chess, dominoes, checkers, backgammon, weizhi, double sixes, and go, have been much more than asobi [play], an entertaining pastime. As the kings, queens, knights, and pawns of chess demonstrate, board games often served the function of sharpening one’s strategic acumen. Often such games could be a form of divination. Board games combine skill and chance. In China a game like go was considered one of the four gentlemanly arts. In Japan the activity was part of the basic education of the elite. At times the stakes were high. Other occasions, however, partook of frivolity, such as when the daughters of Tamakazura play a game of go to determine who would win the favourite cherry tree in the garden (Chapter 44, Takekawa [Bamboo River]).
This arresting ivory piece is an example of a genre called okimono, decorative sculptures that came into vogue during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when interior design began incorporating elements of Western-style decoration. Sculptors of traditional objects like netsuke found new outlets for their work as the demand for the more conservative pieces dwindled. The exoticism of our piece is underscored by the fact that these four players are seated at a table instead of on the floor. Even without the benefit of Western costume, their poses – the crossed legs or the leg draped carelessly across the brace of the table – manage to suggest foreign-ness. Japanese art is rife with skeletons assuming roles normally allocated to living people: playing musical instruments, dancing, even acting as policemen. They are semi-comical, but with a bite that reminds us of the inescapable ephemerality of fleshly existence. These figures, with their humourless grins, embody that special combination of humour and pathos. They seem to be saying ‘have fun, but the Grim Reaper [Yama, the King of Death] will get you in the end.’
A similar carving of a single skeleton seated on a chair by Asahi Gyokuzan was exhibited at the Second National Domestic Exhibition, 1881, as well as a carving of a skull now in the Tokyo National Museum. See Shibuya Kuritsu Shoto Bijutsukan, Nihon no zoge bijutsu [History of Japanese Ivory Carving], The Shoto Museum of Art, (Tokyo, 1996), p. 82-3 and Art of East and West from World Expositions 1855-1900, Paris, Vienna and Chicago, (Tokyo, 2004), p. 44, no. 1-92.
This arresting ivory piece is an example of a genre called okimono, decorative sculptures that came into vogue during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when interior design began incorporating elements of Western-style decoration. Sculptors of traditional objects like netsuke found new outlets for their work as the demand for the more conservative pieces dwindled. The exoticism of our piece is underscored by the fact that these four players are seated at a table instead of on the floor. Even without the benefit of Western costume, their poses – the crossed legs or the leg draped carelessly across the brace of the table – manage to suggest foreign-ness. Japanese art is rife with skeletons assuming roles normally allocated to living people: playing musical instruments, dancing, even acting as policemen. They are semi-comical, but with a bite that reminds us of the inescapable ephemerality of fleshly existence. These figures, with their humourless grins, embody that special combination of humour and pathos. They seem to be saying ‘have fun, but the Grim Reaper [Yama, the King of Death] will get you in the end.’
A similar carving of a single skeleton seated on a chair by Asahi Gyokuzan was exhibited at the Second National Domestic Exhibition, 1881, as well as a carving of a skull now in the Tokyo National Museum. See Shibuya Kuritsu Shoto Bijutsukan, Nihon no zoge bijutsu [History of Japanese Ivory Carving], The Shoto Museum of Art, (Tokyo, 1996), p. 82-3 and Art of East and West from World Expositions 1855-1900, Paris, Vienna and Chicago, (Tokyo, 2004), p. 44, no. 1-92.