Guandong Folk Arts Museum

For our second excursion on Sunday, we went to the Guandong Folk Arts Museum, which was once the private household of the Chen family, and has been variously called the Chen Clan Academy and the Chen Ancestral Hall. I found its architecture to be comforting, peaceful, and beautiful within the constraints of stone-and-wood architecture; the only thing I could imagine its inhabitants wanting more of was climate control. Here's a shot of one courtyard and part of a roof.


The museum contains a variety of artwork, including paper cutting,


ivory carving,


embroidery (Joyce liked this one for its resemblance to a Dutch Renaissance still-life),


and porcelain (yes, Dad, I know you think it's all Johnny-come-lately junk).



I was particularly taken by the display of how to make a set of concentric ivory spheres (one example at the museum had 43 layers!). Start with a chunk of tusk, make it a sphere, drill conical ports, then scrape sideways out of the ports to free each sphere. Once a sphere is free, one can detail it into an elaborate grillwork. I wonder how much time one of these takes. And I wish I'd thought of this when idling away time at summer camp--the soapstone on Catalina Island would have been perfect for this.


Oh yeah, almost forgot: gratuitous elephants!