The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Bottle with “Oil-Spot” Glaze

Art Object

Peony Pavilion

Presented November 30, 2012

Tan Dun, director

With the aim of animating Metropolitan Museum galleries in new ways, Met Museum Presents offers one of five performances of the sixteenth-century Kunqu opera masterpiece The Peony Pavilion, in a seventy-minute version developed and directed by celebrated composer Tan Dun with choreography by Huang Doudou, one of China's most prominent dancers, in the Met's Astor Court, the courtyard modeled on a seventeenth-century garden.

The performance is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Chinese Gardens: Palace Pavilions, Scholars' Studios, Rustic Retreats, on view August 18, 2012–January 6, 2013, which explores the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than one thousand years, featuring more than seventy paintings and contemporary photographs as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, and textiles drawn from the Museum's collections.

The Peony Pavilion is one of the most important works of classical Chinese opera. A sweeping love story with subplots involving feudalism, the work in its original form consisted of fifty-five acts that take more than twenty hours to perform. This version is directed by Zhang Jun, one of China's most respected Kunqu performers, and remains faithful to the core plot focusing on the love story between the heroine and hero—Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei—and the Peony Pavilion where their love began.

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Bottle with “Oil-Spot” Glaze

Period:: Yuan dynasty (1271–1368)
Date:: 14th century
Culture:: China
Medium:: Stoneware with iron glaze (Jizhou ware)
Dimensions:: H. 13 3/4 in. (34.9 cm); Diam. 7 1/2 in. (19.1 cm)
Classification:: Ceramics
Credit Line:: Gift of Mrs. Samuel T. Peters, 1926
Accession Number:: 26.292.70

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 202

Description

One of many glaze effects re-created both in Japan and in the West, “oil-spot” decoration is created by applying an iron-rich slip to a ceramic body and then covering the slip with an iron-rich glaze. During firing, the glaze melts and separates and the iron bubbles to the surface to create the dramatic design.
See also
What
Metal (59,364)

Ceramics (29,320)

Vessels (21,921)

Pottery (12,856)

Iron and iron alloy (6,952)

Glaze (5,188)

Iron (3,753)

Bottles (3,336)

Stoneware (1,407)
Where
Asia (68,071)

China (17,417)
When
A.D. 1000-1400 (7,084)
In the Museum
Asian Art (35,222)
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
China, 1000–1400 A.D.

Central and North Asia, 1000–1400 A.D.