Devouring Feline on Waist: Some Early Chinese Belt Hooks Revisited in Comparative Perspective

After receiving an impetus from the art of the steppes since the middle of the first millennium BCE, the zoomorphic design of early Chinese garment hooks underwent a subtle but consequential transformation in character. Manifesting this point, a handsome piece in the Freer Gallery is described to combine “realism and abstraction, a synthesis that appears in Chinese art as early as the Shang dynasty.” There is no evidence, however, that realistic representation holding such an organic, tensional, and dynamic feeling took shape back to the “Shang” art of early Bronze Age China. Though often associated with the hook design of a beast biting foliate ornamentation, the Freer motif was ultimately derived from the fashion of animal combat in the steppe. Infiltrating the Central Plains from around 500 BCE, the so-called animal-style art of Eurasia was ingeniously Sinicized and adapted to the “Chinese” context. In this process, the prey of the combating animals seems to have been occasionally replaced by a human, as evidenced by a hook from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and another piece from a private collection. Featuring a northern barbarian dress and an Europoid look, respectively, the warriors from these two examples resisted in a close manner the devouring feline with a similar posture. Equipped with a transcultural mindset and comparative perspective, this article will investigate the possible cultural and artistic exchange between early China, its cultural frontiers, and Eurasian neighbors that lies behind these striking hooks.