Kenia Vargas
Weekly Response Paper #2
I was really amazed by the amount of vessels that I read from the book. My favorite vessel was the “ding vessel”. This was my favorite vessel because it reminded me of a stone mortar called “mortero de piedra” in Spanish. We use this stone mortar to make a spicy salsa, so when ever I look at the ding vessel it reminds me of my own culture. It has the same structure with the four legs to support the “bowl” on the top. The ding vessel was used for cooking as well as in my culture with the stone mortar. They were also used for storage and rituals offerings to their ancestors. When this vessel was used during rituals it was a symbol of authority. If someone owed more than one of this kind of vessel they were associated with power and domination over land. The decoration has a lot of significance in this kind of vessel. For example in the most common ding vessel, the final type of decoration was the inscription.These inscriptions were used to identify the function of the vessel, the owner or they could simply be poems or even stories of why the ding was created. Another thing that amazed me was the different styles of art comparing a Japan vessel with a Korean vessel. When we discussed about those two pieces of art in class I was so interested in knowing why the styles were so similar yet different at the same time. After the discussion we had I was comparing both objects and I noticed more differences than similarities and it all had to do with the time period.
The Korean vessel was from 3000 B.C.E and the vessel from Japan was from the
Middle Jomon period. The styles from each vessels can be described as unique in their own ways. Another thing that really caught my attention in these first pages of reading were the jades. These were really important during the Early Zhou period. The jades are basically nephrite. The colors vary from green, brown, cream, yellow, black, gray or mottled due to the presence of impurities mainly iron compounds. The first jades known were the congs. The songs were a form of ancient Chinese jade artifact. Generally they are considered to be a ritual object during sacrificial burial ceremonies. To make these congs they would use two distinct types of jade objects such as a disk and a tube. They have a square outer section around a circular inner part. The way they made them look sort of like masks or faces made people understand that they were for spiritual rituals and burial ceremonies. When looking at a cong you automatically see the face looking part of this jade. It puts you in a stage of relief I believe due to the eyes being o vibrant and present. There were tons of shapes of jades that caught my attention other than the cong , for example the fish jade. This kind of jade had a lot of importance such as other animal jades. What impressed me the most was the fish because it had a lot to do with the Yellow River. The Yellow River to me signifies the beginning of new land in Asia.
This river interested me because when Ms. Lee showed us a map of it, it instantly came to my mine that a lot of people were civilizing by the river since they needed water to suvive. These things interest me because it shows how as people we have came a long way starting civilization by rivers not only in Asia, but also around the world. For example in the U.S our “great” river is the Mississippi River. So by knowing al these things from the past we see how people started from literally nothing and now it has become something amazing. All this art helps us understand how pope lived back then and what their culture was like compared to culture in this era.