FROM THE STORAGE– WORKS OF ART YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE

When we approached the colleagues of the National Museum of Taiwan with a photograph of the objects in inventory numbers 521 and 522, their very surprising questions were whether the objects form a pair and whether an oyster shell might by chance belong to them. They then shared the following story with us.

On the bank of the river, an oyster was spreading its shell to sunbathe. A snipe flew there, coveted the soft flesh of the oyster and started pecking at it. The oyster closed quickly, and the bird's beak snapped between its shells. ‘It won’t rain today or tomorrow. You will die like that, oyster!’ - said the snipe.

‘Neither today, nor tomorrow will you escape my clench. You are the one who will starve to death, snipe.’ – replied the oyster.

Neither one let the other go. Then a fisherman passed by and put both in his net.

There is a Chinese saying: ‘When a snipe and an oyster quarrel, the fisherman benefits’ it means that if two disputants cannot agree, a third person will eventually get the best of it.  According to Taiwanese colleagues, the characters in the story are a popular theme among local craftsmen, and the bamboo root sculptures clearly depict a bird and a fisherman.

They would not call them idols, as they were listed in the museum’s inventory books, these are rather folk arts.

A merchant gave these objects as a gift to John Xantus in Hong Kong. According to the records these objects came from the island of Formosa, known as Taiwan today. We do not know how many different owners they had before, whether these objects were related, whether there was another (or possibly more than one) part of them, or how much information was lost by the time they were catalogued in the museum in 1874. They may have nothing to do with the story above. But here and now, for one Warehouse Wednesday, they have met and we have learnt Chinese wisdom.

Macsai Boglarka, museologist