We made our way to the Shaanxi province museum and spent a couple of hours wandering around its halls. It has a great collection of articles from thousands of years of Chinese history. Ceramics dominate but there are many bronze vessels and weapons and carved stone statues and stone pieces from ancient buildings. There is a nice collection of Buddhas. One is serene and soft in white stone. A plump statuette of a T’ang beauty always amuses me. She looks so proud and conscious of being gorgeous, but does not fit the modern style at all.
The low point of the museum for us was a room where paintings were for sale at excessive prices. Nonetheless, the room is worth a visit if only because it gives an overview of styles of work being produced now in China. As I have said before much of Chinese art is devoted to copying the tried and true but there has been experimentation with Western approaches. Some of that has been approved by the national psyche and it is now also copied. This room had both kinds of copied items but I didn’t see anything at all that betrayed an innovative hand and eye. Most annoying, however was not the lack of creativity but the saleswoman who followed us around telling us how much of a discount she would give us on everything we looked at despite me telling her at the beginning that I would not be buying anything. She persisted and I told her explicitly but politely that she was wasting her time and I did not want to hear about prices. However she did not give up and we left feeling a little annoyed instead of feeling pleasure at the art. Hey! Chinese art is beautiful. It harbours none of the shocks that Western artists often inflict on their viewers so never leaves an ‘eeuw!’ taste in the mouth. Unfortunately, our expectation of the new and different makes us a little prone to boredom as we leave yet another display of the same paintings.
Luckily we had more exhibition halls to explore and our pleasant mood returned. One of the laudable things about this Museum is that visitors are permitted to take photos, though not to use a tripod. (Strangely, I went through the whole place with a tripod last year and no one asked me to put it away.)
Then I took SG to the street that leads to the Forest of Stones Museum. I realized she would not enjoy that kind of thing so it was not on our itinerary but the street leading there is devoted to art and has numerous shops selling papercuts, masks, brushes and ink stones, paintings and calligraphic works. Ellen bought papercuts of butterflies and I bought a nice teapot as a gift. Tea shops in China are often a pleasure to visit. We were invited to sit down by the lovely owner of the shop and she poured us tea in fragile cups as she showed us her wares and talked about them in simple English. I bought a packet of Ginseng Oolong at a quarter of the price I was asked to pay in Beijing in winter. It is pleasant and stimulates the immune system. I really believe in the power of Ginseng. It is an amazing plant.
We went back to the hotel for a rest then went out to eat at a Chinese place near the south gate of the city wall (restored perhaps a little too well so the sense of age is missing). Prices were good and so was the food. Shining girl ate chicken, potato and egg, a victory as she is as hard to feed from another culture’s cuisine as many of my Chinese friends are when I try to introduce them to Western food.