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Lot Essay
This bowl is crisply molded with a pair of fish swimming amongst lotus and waterweed in a beautifully balanced design, and belongs to a rare group of Ding-type wares covered in a brown glaze. A comparable Liao-dynasty brown-glazed bowl with a related design of two fish swimming in a lotus pond, also with an exposed white porcelain rim, from the Qingzhou city site in Balin-youqui, and now in the Balinyouqi Museum, is illustrated in Complete Collection of Ceramic Art Unearthed in China – 4 – Inner Mongolia, Beijing, 2008, no. 110. Another Liao-dynasty brown-glazed bowl with molded floral panels from Xiaokengzi village, Aohanqi, and now in the Aohanqi Museum, is illustrated in the same publication, no. 109, where it is identified as Ding ware. A further dark-brown glazed bowl identified as Ding ware and decorated with panels of ducks and flowers, Jin dynasty, from the Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Collection, is illustrated by R. Mowry in Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers, Chinese Brown and Black-Glazed Ceramics, 400-1400, Cambridge, 1996, p. 117, no. 19. When the current bowl was published by Jan Wirgin in 1970 in “Sung Ceramic Designs,” B.M.F.E.A., Bulletin no. 42, Stockholm, it was shown with other Ding ware bowls with fish designs, pl. 90-a.
Fish have many auspicious associations in Chinese culture. The early Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi ( 369-298 BC) consistently used fish to exemplify creatures who achieve happiness by being in tune with their environment. Much of the popularity of fish as a decorative theme, especially in later dynasties, hinges on the fact that the word for fish, yu, is a homophone for the word for abundance or surplus - thus two fish represent doubled abundance and a gold fish an abundance of gold. The depiction of fish in water, as on the current bowl, has also come to provide a rebus or visual pun for yushui hexie, 'may you be as harmonious as fish and water'. Such symbolism is particularly appropriate in the context of marriage, and decoration including two fish additionally symbolizes both fertility and conjugal happiness in the same context. On the current bowl the fish are shown with lotus. One word for lotus in Chinese is he, which sounds the same as the word for harmony and thus reinforces that theme. Another word for lotus is lian, which suggests the word for 'successive', which is appropriate in the context of both progeny and harmony.
Fish have many auspicious associations in Chinese culture. The early Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi ( 369-298 BC) consistently used fish to exemplify creatures who achieve happiness by being in tune with their environment. Much of the popularity of fish as a decorative theme, especially in later dynasties, hinges on the fact that the word for fish, yu, is a homophone for the word for abundance or surplus - thus two fish represent doubled abundance and a gold fish an abundance of gold. The depiction of fish in water, as on the current bowl, has also come to provide a rebus or visual pun for yushui hexie, 'may you be as harmonious as fish and water'. Such symbolism is particularly appropriate in the context of marriage, and decoration including two fish additionally symbolizes both fertility and conjugal happiness in the same context. On the current bowl the fish are shown with lotus. One word for lotus in Chinese is he, which sounds the same as the word for harmony and thus reinforces that theme. Another word for lotus is lian, which suggests the word for 'successive', which is appropriate in the context of both progeny and harmony.