Statues in “Power and Beauty” suggest the role of religion in Qing dynasty life.
“Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” the multisensory experience of Chinese art now showing in Mia’s Target Galleries, is already a critically acclaimed landmark of museum exhibition design. No one has seen Chinese art—or any other art—in quite this way before, against a theatrical backdrop of sound, light, smell, and dramatic staging.
But it’s also, at its core, a great story told through objects.
Here’s how it begins: in darkness. Obscurity. The unknown. A single object sits in the shadows, a black glazed porcelain vase that suggests a beautiful counterpoint to the gloom. There is no light, after all, without dark. Yin and yang.
China’s last dynasty would prove to be its greatest. Government stabilized. Prosperity rose. Art flourished, especially in the Forbidden City, the enormous, walled compound of the emperor and his vast court. The Qing (pronounced Ching) dynasty grew the country into the fourth-largest empire the world has ever seen.
But no one could have known this when the dynasty began, in 1644, after a series of invasions from neighboring Manchuria ushered the country into the unknown. Into, well, darkness. And no one could have envisioned the end of imperial rule altogether in 1912, some 268 years later.
Hundreds of Chinese art objects imply the abundance of the Qing dynasty in “Power and Beauty.”
In the second gallery, emptiness gives way to abundance—an incredible assemblage of art that implies this rising materialism. The Qing court invested in virtuosic craftsmanship like few others the world over, and here’s a glimpse of the result. To live in the Forbidden City then was to live among this beauty.
Of course, to live in the Forbidden City was also to live with power. And in the next few galleries, the limits of this power are explored (spoiler: there weren’t many). A throne, the ultimate status symbol, sits before a fearsome dragon—the actual symbol that emperors used to visualize their unlimited power.
It’s left to a tiny, ancient figure—the common man—to symbolize the one limit placed on the emperor. According to tradition, the monarch’s divine authority was conditional on his treatment of his subjects. If he was cruel and unjust, he could theoretically be toppled. In practice, however, not so much.
The lure of the mountains in “Power and Beauty.”
The emperor was not entirely omnipotent, though. There was one thing he could not have, the same thing that has plagued Disney princesses for half a century: he could not know how it felt to not be the emperor. And to go deeper into the “Power and Beauty” galleries is to go deeper into the emperor’s experience. His infinite power and pleasures as well as his occasional desire to escape it all. To lose himself—and his responsibilities—in the mountains, if only vicariously through art.
In the end, as in many great epics, the darkness yields to light. A pale, intricately carved vase. The sound of waves against rocks—an aural mirror of the wave pattern along the hem of imperial robes, and a metaphor of power and beauty.
Reserve your experience here: http://bit.ly/PowerandBeauty