Hi All
Geoff recently posted some pics of his "eagle" bottle by Wang Jinshan 王金山 painted in 1998 .
No-one had ever heard of Wang Jinshan before, but Steven very cleverly found the artist's name on an obscure Chinese website of Ji-School artists
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http://baike.haosou.com/doc/6439534.html________________________
I recently downloaded the entire website and ran it through a Google translation program which gives a rough-n-ready translation (but often goes haywire when it comes to names, which Google often tries to translate as having real meaning : Lu Junwei comes out as "Rousseau" and WXS often comes out as "Wang 3" )
The result was - to say the very least -
very fascinating !
The website lists about 100 x Ji School artists :
- roughly 40% are the big names ( WXS, Wang Baichuan, Fu Guoshun, Suo Zhenhai etc - also,
very interestingly : Hou Yanbin and
even Zhang Rucai... so the person who wrote the website was
not a total WXS acolyte )
- roughly 20% are up-coming and by now quite well-known artists from the mid 2000s (e.g Hu
Xiaoran, Yuan Shijia, Yu Nong, Pan Jiafang etc)
all the above 60% are in my data base - roughly 40% are artists whose names I have
NEVER ever heard of before apart from
a couple that appear obscurely on Bill Patrick's website and/or among David Osborne's auction sales!
All the artists on this website have biographical details - although with some errors e.g birth date - and there are also many references to alternative names (either art name or real name as the case may be) except for the last 8 artists who just appear as a NAME, nothing else, among whom is Wang Jinshan (So, sorry, Geoff - nothing else is known about WJS .... so far !)
I date this list and therefore when "baike.haosou" set up this website to about 2007/ 2008 judging by:
a) the latest date on the list of big-time awards to WXS
b) the absence of some important VMIPB artists who only became more well-known in the very late 2000s
What was particularly interesting for me was the inclusion in the list of some obscure and now retired Wang Guanyu students, a few of whose works I bought direct from WGY the first time I went to Hengshui in 2009 (e.g Han Ye, Qiu Shi ). Previously the only references to these students were a few hand-written notes by Wang Guanyu himself. They never appeared in CIPMA.
It seems to me that every "LIST" of Ji School artists reflects when the author went through his main collecting phase in life.
Given that many - if not most - VMIPB collectors seem to go through a rather crazy "collect-anything-and-everything" phase, as I did from about 2007 -2012 , each "LIST" gives a "
snap-shot" of a 5 - 10 year period of peak activity by a certain number of artists : some of the oldies ( slowly fading out) and some of the newbies (quickly fading in and out like shooting stars)
I can clearly see this in Bill Patrick's website which (until I
finally post all my own bottles there , and not counting the CIPMA scans which I sent Bill, plus a couple of other book scans which I also sent Bill and which he later mounted on to his website ) mainly reflects a
snap-shot of Bill's buying passion during several visits to Hengshui in the early 2000s, particularly from students of Li Shouxun and Hou Yanbin.
The same applies to David Osborne's auction bottles, many which were bought in the same period, i.e. early 2000s : another
snap-shot, roughly contemporaneous with Bill
Again, I can see the same
snap - shot effect when I look at the S'Pore Nanyang landmark book of bottles which were mostly bought in the 1990s / very early 2000s (and to a lesser extent I see it in the pics which Richy gave me of his VMIPBs, most of which I date to the 1990s and the early 2000s)
CIPMA itself is a
snap-shot , bearing in mind that every artist who appears in CIPMA (reportedly) had to pay a fee to be included in the book, so only serious and active artists in the mid 2000s were included in CIPMA
I can also see the
snap-shot effect in what Geoff has shown me of his collection, most of which he told me was collected in the 1990s (thus some real gems e.g his Lu Jianguang masterpieces !)
Same same
snap-shot effect for Pat's collection which, as far as I can understand, was mostly collected in the 1990s and early 2000s (please correct me if I am wrong on that point, Pat).
Pat once sent me a list of all the artists whose works he collected and they are all in my DB by Pin Yin names. But still for many of them I have zero biographical information and in many cases still not even the correct Chinese character name . (If you scan my DB for artists with the code "Z" as the source origin you will pick up all the artists whose works Pat collected, and which I still cannot trace beyond a Pin Yin name given to me by Pat.)
I once proudly boasted to Pat that I thought my DB had captured at least 80 -85%% of all VMIPB artists. Pat put me firmly in my place with a : "NOT SO Peter ! - barely 50% if even that" no-holds-barred very frank reply.
I was wrong and Pat was right !
And of course
the most important
snap-shot of all was in J.H. Leung's "A New Look of Inside Painted Snuff Bottles" which gives a
snap-shot of the MIPB scene when he collected in the late 1970s / 1980s / very early 1990s
So far I have made no attempt to patch together all these
snap-shots although they are ALL included in my data base (plug ! plug !), which includes biographical details of every artist whose name I have encountered, and examples of their contemporary bottle pics from every possible
snap-shot I could get my hands on, starting with current web-sites ( both English and Chinese) and going back as far as possible via journals and books.
As far as I know my DB is the only complete record and summation of all these separate threads and source material.
I think I am quickly getting too old to weld my DB into a smooth-reading record of every artist : his/her biographical details from earliest to latest reference and examples of all his/ her pics grouped by year-of-painting showing the progression of skill (or otherwise) from budding student to master - to faded master (or in some rare cases : to new heights of creativity in later life e.g. Sun Honglin and Fu Guoshun)
Hopefully a new younger and enthusiastic collector of VMIPBs with better computer skills than mine will pick up my DB and take up where I must eventually leave off
It took me 24 hours ( I mean 3 x days @ 8 hours/ day !) total elapsed time to work through the baike.haosou.com website and categorize every old / new artist for inclusion in my DB
The only (small) compensation is that MSN data bases automatically insert new entries in alphabetical order ! Thus I whenever I cut-n-paste a load of new artist files into my DB , MSN automatically inserts them into the DB in the correct alphabetical positions.
Thank Bill Gates for small mercies !
I attach the complete baike.haosou.com website in Chinese and (bad) English translation
I had to break it into two parts to stay under the 400kB limit for Forum attachments
There's an overlap at Hu Xiaoran and Yuan Shijia
Happy downloading and research !
Cheers
Peter
PS : A funny thing about the baike.haosou.com website was that it lists an artist named "Song Yi Min"
At first I thought this must be a misspelling for Song Yi Ming , who was certainly at the forefront of VMIPB artists in 2007/2008 . But NO! It's really Song Yi
Min 宋 义
民 not Song Yi
Ming 宋义
明 and the biographical details show that they are definitely two different artists.
PPS : George - please pin this !