A universe painted in lacquer

"Afar, I gaze upon the surging white clouds. They billow and drift, then pause at ease; clear and turbid currents mingle in boundless murk, rising layer upon layer … Coiling like a wheel in mid-heaven, they resemble startled tigers and frightened dragons ... Jostling and pressing in restless tumult."

These enigmatic lines come from Jia Yi, a precocious poet and political thinker of China's Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24). Sidelined from political life and dead at just 33, he infused his rhapsodies with philosophical and allegorical meaning, animated by an imagination of astonishing vitality and inexhaustible invention.

For readers familiar with Jia Yi's verses, a visit to the Nanjing Museum in Jiangsu province offers an uncanny encounter between word and image. A lacquered shield on display bears swirling clouds on one side and writhing tigers, dragons and other mythical creatures on the other. One can almost imagine Jia Yi contemplating these patterns before setting them free in words.

Measuring about 75 centimeters long and 30 centimeters wide, the shield consists of lacquer applied over a ramie-fabric core. As Zuo Jun, curator of an ongoing exhibition of ancient Chinese lacquerware, puts it, the object "offers a point of encounter between Han craftsmanship and the literary imagination of the age".

The exhibition, running until Nov 15, takes a deliberately focused approach, narrowing its scope both chronologically to the Western Han Dynasty and geographically to the ancient Guangling region, centered on present-day Yangzhou and its surroundings in Jiangsu province.

"Every object, the shield included, opens a window into the world of the Han: not only how people lived, worked, and adorned their surroundings, but also how they anticipated the passage beyond death," Zuo says.

In these objects, the divide between the inhabited world and imagined realms — celestial domains or the afterlife — seems less a boundary than a threshold. Their intricate designs bring together nature's untamed vitality with the cosmic forces the Han people sought to evoke in all their mystery and grandeur.

In ancient Chinese thought, these generative and transformative forces, at work throughout the cosmos, were known as qi. Present in every breath and living being, qi also animated the universe, setting clouds in motion, as Jia Yi so vividly captured in verse.

"If qi speaks to an underlying principle, clouds, the vaporous manifestation of a shifting process at work, offer a natural phenomenon through which we can contemplate it," Zuo says, referring to the undulating designs known as yunqi wen, or cloud-and-qi motifs.

"But clouds here should not be understood simply as formations high in the sky. Anyone who has lived in the humid, mountainous regions of southern China knows how mist rises from valleys and gathers over lakes. These, too, are clouds."