Leaping Deer, Rapacious Birds, and Menacing Snakes: Chu Lacquer Art and the Steppe Connection

During the Eastern Zhou period (771-221 BCE), one of the most sophisticated and imaginative artistic centers could be found in the powerful southern state of Chu, which spread across modern-day Henan, Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui provinces. Chu was influenced not only by traditions of the past, but by the diverse regional artistic cultures that comprised the vast kingdom and far beyond. Significantly, Chu shared a special affinity for fantastic zoomorphic imagery with distant nomadic cultures who lived on the Eurasian steppe north of the warring Chinese kingdoms. Chu culture is especially well-known for its unique images of fantastic hybrid creatures adorned with real deer antlers, but small zoomorphic screens, among other lacquered burial objects featuring animal imagery and found in tombs of the elite, make evident that Chu artisans were also familiar with nomadic artistic conventions and themes. The Chu adopted these foreign conventions and themes into their artistic repertoire and adapted them for their own cultural needs. This paper argues that the appropriation of nomadic animal imagery in Chu was not motivated by a fascination with the exotic as seen during the later Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE), when nomadic themes became more prominent in Chinese art due to the Han empire’s negotiations with the Xiongnu, but rather, by a shared socio-cultural belief in the efficacy of zoomorphic images.