Soofeen Hu and the Museum of Jade Art

At the Museum of Jade Art, which sits back from the heavily traveled thoroughfare of Jianguo North Road in Taipei, the thick wooden door at the entrance is studded with 36 doornails crafted from jadeite, and qualifies as a work of installation art in and of itself. The look is very much like that presented by the massive doors guarding the entrance to an old Chinese palace. To re-create the look of weathered brass doornails, the artist has gone to the extreme of burying his high-priced jadeite for several months in iron-ore-laden soil at a controlled temperature to oxidize the surface of the jadeite. Unlike ordinary doornails, however, these are all made in the form of lotus seedpods, some laden with seeds, others from which the seeds have dropped, bespeaking the circle of life and death.

The first things a visitor sees upon entering the lobby are unprocessed samples of the three basic types of jadeite. The first is known literally in Chinese as "mountain stone," i.e. jadeite found in situ in primary deposits at higher elevations. The second is called "water stone," i.e. jadeite that has broken away from its original rock formation and rolled downhill into alluvial deposits at the bottom of a valley or ravine. This type is the best quality, but not so abundant. And the third is a sort of hybrid known colloquially in Chinese as "half-mountain, half-water" stone, i.e. jadeite from eluvial deposits, found downhill from primary deposits but not yet at the bottom of any valley or ravine. On one wall of the next room hangs a painting depicting the mining of jadeite in the Myitkyina region of northern Myanmar. Myitkyina is the only place in the world that turns out gem-quality jadeite, and has been mined since the 13th century. On the floor in front of the painting is a model showing the Uru River, which winds a serpentine path down through the hills. In the middle of the river lies a beautiful piece of raw jadeite, silently waiting for a miner to discover and carry it away.

The introductory exhibit gives a brief look at the history of jadeite. The earliest record of jadeite making its way into China is from 1733. Records from the Qing imperial house show that the governor of Yunnan Province delivered jadeite from Myanmar as tribute to the Qing court. The northern part of modern-day Myanmar belonged to Yunnan Province in the 18th century, but China today does not produce jadeite.

Display cases in the middle of the museum contain an exhibit series entitled Transformation. The word "transformation" here derives from the ruminations of the artist and owner of these precious jades regarding a simple question: Now that the great masterpiece Jadeite Cabbage with Insects already exists, what can be done in the jade art of China that challenges the limits of the possible?

Potential answers to this question are put forward in Dance of the Phoenix, in which a piece of raw jadeite provides the backdrop for the likenesses of cloud-riding apsaras, a phoenix, and the Three Sages of the West. In a second piece, curly strands of orchid grow out of a rock, providing a wispy touch of imperial green. And in a third piece, the artist has produced a pair of worn out old flip-flops that cannot but elicit a smile from the viewer.

Who could do a thing like that? Who would have the nerve to treat rare jadeite in such cavalier fashion? That would be the artist Soofeen Hu, who comes from a long line of jade merchants and is now in the process of writing a new chapter in the history of jadeite art. He is enabling jadeite to express a beauty never seen before.

"China cannot have just the one Jadeite Cabbage with Insects!" Soofeen Hu, founder of the Museum of Jade Art and scion of a family that owns jadeite mines in Myanmar, spent his childhood surrounded by brilliant gemstones. In his hands, stones that in times past would likely have served as knick-knacks for the nobility are now transformed into works of serious art.

Soofeen Hu was born in 1965 in Phakant, the biggest jadeite mining center in Myanmar. His great-grandfather, a military officer in Sichuan Province in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty, led troops to Myanmar, settled in for the long haul, and ended up working with the government there in the mining and trading of raw jadeite. The family at the height of its prosperity came to own the mining rights at 18 different sites. Soofeen was a favorite of his grandfather, and frequently tagged along beside him because he liked jadeite so much. "When I was seven years old," he confides, "I used to take the stuff to bed with me at night."

Most people in Myanmar adhere to the Theravada school of Buddhism (i.e. the Southern tradition, one of the three main schools of Buddhism along with the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools). For young Soofeen growing up, the sight of Buddhist monks begging for alms was part of everyday life, and he often accompanied his mother, a devotee of Guanyin, to Buddhist temples to hear the monks tell tales about the life of Sakyamuni Buddha. Against his father's wishes, he entered a Buddhist monastery at the age of nine as a novice monk, fasting from noon each day and begging for alms in the streets.

Now, 36 years later, he still vividly recalls his first time out to beg for alms. Forbidden to wear shoes, he wore his tender feet raw, and when he complained to his master, the response was: "You must experience suffering. Only then can you feel the pain of others, and appreciate good fortune. Only then will you have a greater love to share with all of creation."

After returning to secular life at age 15, Hu proceeded to the Golden Palace Monastery in Mandalay, where he practiced meditation and studied Buddhist scripture. It was a rare opportunity, and had a deep impact on his life. There he acquired an abiding love for Buddhist statues, and to this day practices meditation with fellow sculptors before setting to the task of carving, so as to achieve serenity in both mind and body.

In 1983 he entered Mandalay University to study mineralogy and philosophy. During his university years he often traveled between Thailand and Myanmar on business, and learned from his father how to cut and sculpt jadeite. He graduated from university in 1988 at a time of political upheaval in Myanmar, and settled into the family business. He learned to design jewelry, and traveled to Thailand, Hong Kong, Macao, and mainland China to buy and sell gemstones.

Life's Beginning, 48 x 15 x 15 cm, 2008 A stout knotted rope, woven from fine strands, symbolizes the supple strength of a mother's love. Two orchids grow out of the rope, one wilted and one in full bloom, symbolizing the circle of life and death. Not to be overlooked are the cicada emerging from its shell at the base of the rope, an insect preparing to take off in flight at the rope's mid-section, and flitting butterflies at the top.

In 1995, Hu decided to come to Taiwan in search of his roots. He enrolled in National Taiwan Normal University to study Chinese, and on a visit to the National Palace Museum saw the famed Jadeite Cabbage with Insects for the first time. The lifelike sculpture looked as if it had just been pulled from the soil, and left him thunderstruck with its beauty. The dealer in raw gemstone suddenly realized that jadeite is not just a commodity to be sold by the kilo. It can also be transformed into a work of art that leaves the observer gasping in admiration. As he stood before the display case trying to imagine how the creator of the piece selected the stone and wielded the knife, a thought crystallized: "China cannot have just the one Jadeite Cabbage with Insects!" From that point forward, his life was devoted to the sculpting of jadeite.

Just judging by its outer skin, uncut jadeite appears at first glance to be no different from any ordinary stone. Only an experienced expert can judge by looking at the skin what the texture and color of the stone within is likely to be.

Hu explains that besides size, shape, and the look of the outer skin, a key step in judging uncut stone is to "nick a little window" in the stone, i.e. to cut away just a bit of the outer skin to get a look at what's inside, to assess its color, translucence, texture, and cracking. All these factors help the sculptor decide what the stone can be made into.

Once the stone has been cut open, there is no going back, so it is necessary to first use paper and pencil to sketch out possible ways of handling the stone. After careful consideration and the drafting of many designs, the sculptor draws out the basic design on the surface of the stone, and then goes to work.

In 1999, Hu created The Buddha's Moment of Enlightenment, the first piece in his "Enlightenment" series based on stories of the Buddha. In 2002, in order to pray for an end to a drought in Taiwan, he created a statue of Cundi Guanyin, in which the outer skin of the stone is cleverly retained to form golden flames surrounding the deity. The effect is visually stunning.

Dance of the Phoenix, 31 x 25.3 x 2.5 cm, 2009 Nephrite comes in just one color, while jadeite is multi-colored. In crafting this piece, the artist has taken advantage of the many colors in the jadeite to create multi-layered images of spectacular beauty.

Jadeite is a polycrystalline aggregate. It features a dense crystalline structure with a chemical composition of NaAlSi2O6. Perfectly pure jadeite is white, but it is often permeated by chromium, which turns it an intense green color. It may also carry traces of such elements as manganese or iron, for example, or become oxidized and take on other colors, including red, light purple, orange, brown, and black.

Jadeite features many colors. Sculptors generally cut away everything other than the imperial green, which is the most eye-catching and expensive part, but Hu likes to incorporate all the different colors into his work, making them into different types of fauna and flora. He is especially fond of using the contrast between two different colors to highlight the design of the work and achieve a rich depth of composition.

One excellent example is Eyes on the Prize, a work he executed in 2006. It includes an imperial green praying mantis, a jet black cicada, a light green bird, and a black orchid. And in Soft Light, Brilliant Colors, executed in 2008, the stone head of a bodhisattva (created in part by leaving the outer skin of the jade untouched) rests in the silence of a deep mountain ravine, where a solitary orchid emerges from a crevice in the rocks. Behind the bodhisattva, the orchid grows skyward, two colorful snails crawling on its leaves, while the brilliant orchid petals seem more like slippers left behind by celestial sprites. In the meantime, a mantis surveys all from atop the highest leaf.

Eternity in an Instant, 30 x 20 x 18 cm, 2009 Pictured here is a Buddha head that forms part of a larger work that also includes two bodhisattvas. Painstakingly executed coils of hair and closed eyes re-create the beauty of Song-Dynasty carvings, and give expression to the artist's deep religious sentiment.

Even though jadeite has a Mohs hardness of 7, Hu has no problem carving out delicate knotted ropes.

Ropes, in fact, are an important motif in his work. They are made from the same material that makes up a baby's swaddling, and they are a close relative of the strings that fasten a cradle to a pole. And very importantly, for Hu they hearken back to a harrowing experience from his childhood. When he was four or five years old, robbers broke into their home while only he and his mother were there. Holding her son close, she told the intruders, "Take anything you want. Just leave my boy alone."

He never forgot his mother's courage, and in Life's Beginning (2008), the knotted rope stands strong and upright in the center, symbolizing the supple strength of a mother's love. Two orchids grow out of the rope, one wilted and one in full bloom, symbolizing the circle of life and death. The luxuriant orchid roots spring from the rope and wrap around it, while different life forms cling to the orchid stem: a cicada emerging from its shell, an insect preparing to take off in flight, and flitting butterflies. All these different manifestations of the bounty of life, as the rope reminds us, derive from the power of motherly love.

Says Hu, "Creation is central to my life. It's a medium that I use to contemplate existence." And orchids, a recurring theme in his art, are an indelible part of his childhood memories. He often saw wild orchids as a boy. When he and his buddies spotted them high up in towering trees, they would try to clamber up and pick them, but they often slipped and fell to the ground. For Hu, the precious value of orchids derives both from the difficulty of getting one, and also from what they tell us about nature.

The flower often hangs suspended from a tree or cliff, its petals, leaves, and stem all pointing downward, depending on stout roots to hold tightly on to a tree trunk or rock face. "In order to survive, the roots of an orchid must be strong and resilient. Life is like that, clinging on stubbornly in adverse circumstances, and attempting despite all odds to become even stronger."

With In Praise of Life, part of the "Nine Fields of Orchids" series, Hu escapes the bounds of traditional jadeite art by incorporating the very modern motif of a skull into the work. By combining the skull with the orchid theme, Hu successfully creates imagery with an understated poetic sensibility. Having studied Buddhist doctrine seriously from a young age, he often asks himself: Wherein lies the value of life? When a person comes to the end of life, what gift has he left for himself?

"Coming into this life is cause for joy, to be sure, but is leaving it necessarily to be feared? Our bodies do not last for more than a century. In the end, do we leave behind a beautiful orchid? Or just a fleshless pile of bones?" In his works, besides venturing into territory where Eastern culture would rather not set foot, Hu also turns his back on the "in with the good luck, out with the bad" thinking that has underlain jadeite art for hundreds of years.

Eyes on the Prize, 23 x 24 x 15 cm, 2006An imperial green praying mantis sits on an orchid leaf, wings retracted, pincers poised and ready to make a meal of a nearby black cicada. But little does the mantis know that a bird behind is thinking the mantis itself would be a tasty treat. A life-and-death drama is set to unfold!

The museum's permanent collection Thirteen Works by Masters of Calligraphy, Immortalized in Jade, is a series of jadeite pieces that combine the beauty of poetry, calligraphy, and jadeite carving. The works recreate 12 noted calligraphic works selected by former director of the National Palace Museum Chin Hsiao-yi, plus an epilogue explaining the provenance of the series. It includes exemplars of each of the major scripts-seal script, clerical script, semi-cursive script, regular script, and cursive script. Each piece is composed of a flat tablet of jadeite with calligraphic characters executed in either intaglio or relief.

With Hu's enthusiastic support, some 10 pieces of top-quality jadeite worth fully NT$2 million each were treated as simple slabs of stone to turn out this series. Why would anyone mistreat the jade so badly? The answer is simple-Hu wanted to push the limits of calligraphic carving, and see just how beautiful it can be.

All the display cases at the Museum of Jade Art are freestanding to allow visitors to get a 360-degree look at the exhibit pieces. Shown here is Downward Gaze.

Hu met the National Palace Museum director in 2003 when Hu took three works to show to Mr. Chin, who was already in his 80s by that time. The blunt-spoken Chin told Hu just to show him the best piece and not to bother with the other two. Much to Hu's surprise, Chin proceeded to spend a whole hour closely scrutinizing the piece he was shown, then couldn't contain himself and asked to see the other two pieces as well. In the end, the highly regarded museum director paid the ultimate compliment by visiting Hu's office to enjoy his work. Though decades apart in age, the two became fast friends.

The following year, while discussing the subject of orchids with Hu, Chin delved into his private collection and brought out a painting of orchids by 17th-century artist Ba Da Shan Ren. From the subject of orchids, they moved on to discuss the spirit of literati painting in the different dynasties, and Chin urged Hu to infuse richer cultural content into his work. It was at this time that Chin chose the Chinese name for Hu's "Nine Fields of Orchids" series.

When Hu mentioned his desire to establish a museum of jade art, Chin expressed support and named the museum ying wei, a play on the Chinese names of Hu (Hu Yanrong) and his wife, Jane Liu (Liu Weizhen). Their mutual interest in jade is what brought the couple together in the first place, so Chin took the Rong from Hu's name and the Wei from his wife's, and inserted the ideograph for jade into each of the two characters, whence the name ying wei in Chinese.

The museum covers a mere 200 ping of floor space, but in every nook and cranny one runs across evidence of the proprietor's painstaking efforts to incorporate art into the tiniest little details of the facility. The restroom washbasins are fitted with faucets resembling a lotus plant, in which a modern infrared sensor is juxtaposed with water gushing from an artfully carved jadeite lotus pod. Then there are the dragon and lion heads of inky jadeite standing watch over the exit, and the figure of a pot-bellied pixiu, a mythical beast that symbolizes bravery, "pressed into service" in place of the cat figurine that typically beckons to visitors to stop in and shop.

Jadeite is high-priced and art is priceless, to be sure, but the most precious thing of all is to see museum visitors cast off hackneyed notions of what jade art is supposed to look like. Approaching the work with a fresh and open mind and interacting with it is the only way to truly understand the beauty that lies within the stone, and the thought that moved the creator to create it.

Dance of the Phoenix, 31 x 25.3 x 2.5 cm, 2009 Nephrite comes in just one color, while jadeite is multi-colored. In crafting this piece, the artist has taken advantage of the many colors in the jadeite to create multi-layered images of spectacular beauty.

Pas de Deux with Orchids, 22.5 x 17 x 6.5 cm, 2005 Two orchidsprovide the stage for a beetle and a butterfly, each with places to go and things to do as they prepare to take off in flight.

(facing page) Jadeite is extremely hard, and thus quite brittle and easily broken when carved. Ten pieces of top-quality jadeite were broken in the process of carving the Thirteen Works by Masters of Calligraphy, Immortalized in Jade, the most important exhibit at the Museum of Jade Art.

Soofeen Hu spent three years working a hunk of jadeite weighing dozens of kilos to turn out A Singular, Flowing Ease. The piece depicts a decaying lotus leaf, positively gossamer at less than a kilo. In this masterfully executed work, the heft, hardness, and brittle quality that naturally characterize jadeite are completely unapparent. Former director of the National Palace Museum Chin Hsiao-yi praised the work as "unparalleled in its lightness."

The Buddha's Moment of Enlightenment, 22 x 23 x 7 cm, 1999 A devout adherent to Buddhism since childhood, Soofeen Hu has a special love for sculpting Buddhist statuary. Sakyamuni Buddha sits in meditation at the base of this piece beneath the towearing Bodhi tree with swirling clouds above, where the formations trace out seven lotus blooms.