Flask with the Royal Arms of Spain, China, Ming dynasty, 1610–20, porcelain with cobalt blue under clear glaze, Yale University Art Gallery, Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Fund
Blue, White, and Wonderful: Seventeenth-Century Chinese Porcelain
Wednesday, April 16, 2025, 12:30-1:30pm
Free; Meet by the central column in the Gallery lobby
Highlighting a recently acquired Chinese porcelain flask, Denise Patry Leidy, the Ruth and Bruce Dayton Curator of Asian Art at Yale University Art Gallery, discusses a fascinating moment in global ceramic history, when Chinese kilns began producing works specifically for the European market.
European trade with China flourished in the early 17th century, after the famed Portuguese explorer Vasco di Gama opened sea trade between Europe and Asia by sailing around the African coast. In response to political and economic turmoil and the subsequent need for new markets, the kilns at the great complex in Jingdezhen began to diversify by producing ceramics for the court, for the domestic market, and for trade to Japan as well as to India and other parts of the greater Islamic world. Within the coat of arms on the front of the flask, the two rampant lions and two castles indicate that the object was made for the Spanish court. The reverse is painted with a scene of a Chinese scholar resting in a landscape, while the shape of the flask is derived from Islamic metalwork.
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Photo credit: Vincente de Paolo
Artist Talk: Sarah Sze
Thursday, April 17, 2025, 5:30-6:30pm
Free
Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a signature visual language that challenges the static nature of sculpture and painting. Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, dismantling their authority with dynamic constellations of materials that are charged with flux, transformation, and fragility. Captured in this suspension, her immersive and intricate works question the value society places on objects and images and how objects and images ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit.
Coinciding with the explosion of information of the 21st century, Sze’s work simultaneously models and navigates the ceaseless proliferation of information and imagery in contemporary life. Her encyclopedic installations and paintings unfold like a series of experiments that construct intimate systems of order—precarious ecologies in which material conveys meaning and a sense of loss. In this talk, Sze discusses her artistic practice.
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