Early Chinese Ceramics from New York State Museums
纽约州立博物馆藏早期中国陶瓷器

This exhibition, consisting of forty-eight earthenware and stoneware objects spanning six thousand years, traced the development of Chinese ceramics from the Neolithic period (ca. 6500–1700 BCE) through the end of the Song dynasty (960– 1279). Simple, yet striking, in form and decoration, these pieces were created to meet everyday demands for storage, pouring, holding, and transferring, from the very dawn of Chinese pottery-making to just before the major breakthroughs of mass production and underglaze decoration. Each bowl, urn, incense burner, and dish represented a slice of ordinary life in early China. All pieces were borrowed from the permanent collections of five upstate New York museums — Buffalo Museum of Science, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, and Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester — where high-quality examples of Chinese ceramics have been quietly assembled over the past one hundred years.