The material
What green-bean-blue stone actually is, why the name fits, and why it is so often mistaken for jade.
Read itA16A Global Select · Series
Minnan in Stone
Fifteen notes on green-bean-blue stone carving: the stone itself, the thousand years behind it, the way it is cut, and the people who keep the work going. Three parts are published now; the rest follow as they are written.
3 of 15 published
Part One · Knowing the stone
What the material is, how long it has been worked, and how it is cut.
Part Two · Reading the art
Judgement, subject and use: what makes a carving good, and what the figures mean.
What makes it art
Composition, line and mass, judged in a material that gives the carver one chance.
Coming soonThe guardian beasts
Lions, skyward beasts and the rest: what each figure is for and what it promises the household.
Coming soonFolk custom
Where these carvings stood in an ordinary house, and what the people in it asked of them.
Coming soonPart Three · Into daily life
Stone at work in buildings, in workshops and in the hands that keep the trade alive.
Stone in the building
Columns, brackets and doorways: carved stone as part of the structure rather than applied to it.
Coming soonThe hand behind the work
Apprenticeship, repetition, and the years it takes before a chisel is trusted.
Coming soonThe living heritage
What a national heritage listing protects, what it cannot protect, and who carries the work now.
Coming soonPart Four · Keeping and judging
For anyone thinking about keeping a piece rather than only looking at one.
Collecting
What makes a desk carving worth keeping, and why there is no identical second one to wait for.
Coming soonHow to look
Condition, tool marks and patina, judged by eye rather than with a loupe.
Coming soonLiving with stone
Weight, placement and care, and the liberty of a material that does not need to be protected from itself.
Coming soonPart Five · Toward what comes next
New tools, new markets and the place this work holds beside the rest of Chinese carving.
New hands, new tools
Machine cutting and digital modelling, and the stages where hand work still wins.
Coming soonCarrying it outward
The maritime trade that took Minnan carving abroad, and where that work stands now.
Coming soonWhere it stands
Minnan carving beside the northern schools, and the case for reading it as a regional art of its own.
Coming soonRead the series from the top
Every published part of the series is collected in one place, newest first, alongside the notes that are not part of the count.
Open the series indexSee the pieces these notes are about
Every carving in the collection is photographed as it stands, worked on every face including the base, and sold as a single object. The notes above describe the tradition and the material, not the provenance of any individual piece.