Chinese Furniture. Karen Mazurkewich

Chinese Furniture - Karen Mazurkewich


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Ma

      Cola Ma was born into the antiques business. Descended from two generations of antiques dealers, he was left behind when his father and grandfather moved to Hong Kong in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, there was little for the teenager to do in the city of Tianjin. “As a student, I had no job,” he says. There was no school either, so he stayed home and played the violin. Meanwhile, his father, T. K. Ma, had remarried in Hong Kong and opened the Tong Chung Peking Trading Company selling all kinds of antiques, but mainly furniture. When China opened up in 1979, Ma finally moved to Hong Kong looking for “new opportunities.” He was 31, and had little experience with antiques. “At first, I worked for my father, but I realized I needed to learn a lot more.” Instead of working within the confines of the family business, Ma offered his services to local dealer Ian McLean. The seasoned Hollywood Road dealer taught Ma two things: how to restore and refinish fine furniture, and how to appreciate the value of softwood. Four years later, Ma opened his own shop in Hong Kong.

      “In the beginning, my father thought I’d never be able to succeed in the business,” says Ma. But Ma attempted what few other Hong Kong dealers did in the 1980s— he set up a factory in China, based in his hometown of Tianjin. From here, Ma traveled frequently to Beijing to source antiques. In a small suburb in northern Beijing, he stumbled across a small community of furniture dealers from Shanxi province. These were the “runners”—poor men who knew nothing about furniture except that there was plenty of it in their villages and they could realize a profit by “running” in shipments from Shanxi and selling it to shopkeepers. Isolated for centuries, the once-wealthy province of Shanxi was loaded with beautiful hard-wood and softwood furniture in archaic styles that dated back to the Song dynasty.

      Ma quickly struck up a bargain with one dealer—Fan Rong from Xinjiang village. He established a good supply line and hoarded some of the best pieces from the region. A rare incense table he once purchased for 4,000 yuan is now worth roughly $40,000. In 1999, Ma, together with author Curtis Evarts, published his own book on Shanxi softwood furniture, thereby establishing his reputation as king of the vernacular.

      Fan Rong

      Sixteen years ago, Fan Rong was working as a laborer in an iron-producing factory. One day, on a trip to Beijing, he noticed that some of the markets were selling old furniture at fantastic prices. He thought the furniture from his province, Shanxi, was better than the things being peddled. Dipping into his savings, he made his way through the villages of Shanxi knocking on doors, asking to buy old furniture. Everyone asked him, “Why do you buy so much rubbish?” Fan did not let them in on his secret, but the huanghuali furniture he was purchasing for a pittance now sells for tens of thousands of dollars. “It was cheap and it was easy to collect,” he says. His only shopping guide was scholar Wang Shixiang’s book. “It took three years for others to catch on.”

      Fan and his older brother, Fan Kong, were the first furniture runners in southern Shanxi. At the beginning, Fan Kong used a bicycle to travel to a village a few miles away where he bought a table for $92 and sold it for twice that—a sum larger than anything he had every seen. That arbitrage has become the foundation for a thriving business for the Fan brothers and also for a network of runners they helped recruit from the village of Dong Niu. About a hundred men, almost a quarter of the entire village, now buy and sell furniture. The richest have built fortress-like homes and helped pave roads.

      Over the years, the Fan brothers learned the fine art of convincing families to sell their heirlooms. “It’s a battle of wits with the buyer,” says Fan Kong. Not only do the best runners have to talk their way into the homes of suspicious villagers, they must employ a little trickery now and again. Fan once tiptoed stocking feet into the home of a blind woman to evaluate a table she did not want to sell. Once he realized its worth, he convinced her son to tote it away in the dead of night while the old lady was sleeping.

      On a recent visit to Zhao Hailin’s family in Gong village, Fan Rong discovered that a pair of old tables he had tried to buy for several years were now gone. Ms Zhao, an old client, had sold them because she needed to send her two daughters to school. For Fan, the loss of the tables is another sign of the shrinking market. “Now the number of wolves outnumbers the meat,” he says. Adding to Fan’s woes is the fact that television programs and newspapers routinely report on the auction and antiques trade. As villagers become educated, they are no longer satisfied with a few hundred dollars for a choice table. “When I first started, people weren’t aware of the value of furniture, so it was easy to buy,” says Fan. “For years, we tried to keep the prices secret. Only I and the buyer knew how much money he could get,” he says. Not any more.

      As availability shrinks on their home turf, Shanxi suppliers involved in the mad hunt in China’s rural villages must look farther afield for fresh stock. Tales of frustrated runners breaking into homes after a deal goes sour are not uncommon. But there are still a few gems. “Eventually, if you push hard enough, and they are in a good mood, they will sell.”

      Chen Zengbi

      Beijing academic Chen Zengbi remembers well the day he bought his first piece of antique furniture. It was the summer of 1972 and he was making his weekly pilgrimage to the Cultural Relics Bureau. Chen was a student in the architecture department of the University of Peking, and furniture was his specialty—his passion. But this was the period of the Cultural Revolution and to own antique furniture was to be labeled a capitalist roader. The Red Guards were breaking up beautiful pieces and dumping them into warehouses run, ironically, by the Cultural Relics Bureau. The broken bits were being recycled. It was a strange ritual, but as a young student Chen used to visit the warehouses regularly, circumambulating the pile of wreckage “to say goodbye.” One day as he was paying his respects, Chen noticed the small round end of a table foot sticking out of the pile. It was the leg of a square table, but it was made of a very rare wood known as heitanmu (ebony). Intrigued, he asked the staff if they would mind if he dug around for some other bits of similar wood. The overseers obliged this regular visitor. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Chen tore the pile apart looking for the matching pieces. By the time he had found all the parts, he was shaking. He had discovered a rare Ming-dynasty table but he was afraid he could not afford it. The warehouse sold wood by weight, and these heavy bits were going to cost 80 yuan. Chen’s monthly salary was only 56 yuan and he did not have enough money to purchase the pile of wood he had assembled, so he ran around to his family and friends to borrow the rest. He carefully stacked the wood on to a tricycle, covered it with a blanket, and rode home. Back in his apartment, Chen assembled the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. His heart was racing. He was thrilled, yet terrified. To possess such a piece was dangerous. But he could not resist showing his teacher, Yang Yao, a famous furniture scholar. Yang’s jaw dropped. He had never seen such a good piece in all his years. Together they visited the home of Beijing’s famous craftsman Li Jian Yuan. “His expression upon seeing it was similar to my teacher,” says Chen. After sharing his treasure, Chen disassembled the table and hid it under his bed until the Cultural Revolution was over. After gathering his courage to save this piece, he managed to conduct some other rescue operations. Today, he owns hundreds of pieces, and is preparing a book on classical Chinese furniture.

      Classifying Chinese Furniture

      When a piece of art is unsigned, and its date of production is unknown, how should it be classified? This is the conundrum faced by scholars of Chinese furniture. With its artisans relegated to anonymity, and individual styles sublimated, classifying Chinese furniture is a tricky business.

      One obvious approach is to look at function. Using this method, there are nine basic groupings: chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, stools, screens, braziers, stands, and scholarly items. Another approach is to rank pieces by quality, but this lends itself to subjectivity. For example, if the benchmark is carving quality or craftsmanship, then ornate pieces from the Qing dynasty would rank high. But collectors, particularly in the West, favor minimalism and architecturally sculpted pieces, and carving ranks low among them. Thus, simple criteria are useless.

      Instead, scholars


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