Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (review)

In this book the author undertakes to explain how the traditional Chinese artisan manipulated forms in the process of mass production so as to secure certain benefits of technical simplicity and repetition, thus enabling him to make very large numbers of objects ("ten thousand things") with a reasonable outlay of work. The contents of the book were first presented in 1998 as the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art and are published as Bollingen Series xxxv, volume 46. There were eight lectures for which Lothar Ledderose chose eight different media—script, ritual bronze vessels, the clay sculptures of Qin Shihuangdi's buried army, lacquer and porcelain, printing with moveable type, the Kings of Hell paintings made in Ningbo, Chinese architecture, and literati bamboo painting—to illustrate the workings of modular construction. Each of these subjects is distinguished by a combination of medium and social function, the function determining that the object in question was needed in numbers large enough to demand mass production.

The first chapter treats the creation of the Chinese script of some fifty thousand characters by innumerable scholars over centuries of time and suggests that the method used may be peculiar to the Chinese. The author breaks down the process of formation into levels of complexity, leading from a single brushstroke, to a visual component of a character, then to a whole character, hence to a completed text, and finally to all existing characters. What is the advantage of construction by modules? The memory can retain a limited number of configurations if they are repeated often enough; confronted with an infinity of unfamiliar images, or even fifty thousand, it falters. The modular system seeks a balance between unlimited differentiation and absolute reduction of form. The gradual formation of this modular method in writing can be observed throughout the Bronze Age, growing in system as the total number of modules in use declines. Art enters into the formation of characters only when the writer begins to concern himself with the proportions of the component parts, both internally and as a composition within a frame. "To have devised a system of forms in which it is possible to produce distinguishable units in a mass of such breathtaking dimensions is the single most distinctive achievement of the Chinese people"(p. 9).

This achievement was paralleled in the Chinese Bronze Age by ritual vessels which particularly lend themselves to the modular method of design and manufacture. For reasons of religious ritual not wholly understood the vessels were used in great numbers, many being designed in sets. The piece mold method of casting was used exclusively until late Zhou times and the borders of the fields of décor were made to coincide with the edges of the mold sections. The designer accepted the rectangular panel as his ground, hence module, and adapted the components of the taotie to fit within it. The preferred components were few in number like the components of the written character. The proportions of the framed design expanded and contracted internally as needed, thus the finished décor mirrored both the over-all shape of the vessel and the technique of manufacture. Ledderose suggests that the writers like Bernhard Karlgren who strove to give the taotie some kind of symbolic content might have seen the mask in a truer light had they realized it was manipulated as a module in a structure determined from the beginning by the requirements of manufacture. That would not, of course, prevent its being endowed with meaning after its invention, which, in my view, is the order in which these events actually took place. The author discusses the introduction at Houma of the pattern block for casting bronze...