Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hand and Mind at MoCA

Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hands and Mind
The Yi Zhi Tang Collection
November 6, 2010-May 2, 2011

Wooden sliding block puzzle, 1930s. Photo by Niana Liu.

China’s rich tradition of puzzles and fascination with puzzling objects is thoroughly embedded in its arts and culture, and has been a popular cultural export to America since the 19th century. The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) presents Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hands and Mind, curated by Wei Zhang and Peter Rasmussen.

Over the course of a four-month period, more than 100 objects and images from the curators’ private Yi Zhi Tang (art and intelligence) Collection will be on view at MOCA. Consisting of over 1300 antique Chinese puzzles, books, and graphic materials, the collection dates back from the Song dynasty to the mid-20th century. Many of the puzzles are also objets d’art in the classical tradition and exhibit the highest level of workmanship, including beautifully crafted porcelains, carved ivory, and mother-of-pearl.

Literally translated in Chinese as “intelligence games”, puzzles inspire us to challenge our hands and mind. Visitors young and old will have the opportunity to play with modern reproductions of these classic puzzles, including: the tangram – the game that sparked the world’s first international puzzle craze; the nine-linked rings – an object of interest for mathematicians and computer scientists; and the sliding block puzzle – a challenge in military strategy.

The exhibition is accompanied by an 80-page, full-color catalog; and a full-range of public programs designed for audiences of all ages: guided gallery tours; Family Puzzle Days – workshops for budding puzzlers ages 5-12 years; Puzzler Day for newbies and veterans of the puzzling world; and curator talks with Wei Zhang and Peter Rasmussen, who have been collecting and documenting the histories of Chinese puzzles since 1997.


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PUZZLING TEAPOTS
Wei Zhang and Peter Rasmussen call their holdings of 1,400 Chinese puzzles “the art and intelligence collection.” Retired teachers who have homes in Northern California and Beijing, they have spent much of the last 13 years traveling to antiques fairs, auctions, galleries and flea markets to find puzzles dating back 1,000 years.

On Saturday the Museum of Chinese in America in Lower Manhattan will display 100 of their sets alongside videos of traditional puzzle makers and solvers in action.

This married couple have acquired nested cubes, triangles and rings made of silver, jadeite, porcelain, wood and ivory and have researched how they were exported and subjected to scholarly study over the centuries.
Sometimes spending tens of thousands of dollars per acquisition, they also buy trick vessels with hidden compartments. Since around A.D. 960, Chinese artisans have made teapots that can be filled only through bottom holes, and “fairness cups” that leak out of concealed bottom holes if a pourer greedily fills them close to the brim.

“Here’s something we got today,” Mr. Rasmussen said during a recent visit to New York, pulling out a mound of Bubble Wrap he had just picked up at Christie’s. Ms. Zhang sliced open the plastic and revealed a bottom-filling purple pot draped with green leaves, made around 1700. (It cost $6,875 at a Chinese ceramics auction.)

She has been interested in puzzles, she explained, since her childhood in northwest China. During the Cultural Revolution, her father was imprisoned, and the family moved into a warehouse infested by rats. Expelled from school because of her father’s disgrace, she whiled away time making wire puzzles.

“We used them to lock up our storage boxes for food,” she said.

She and her husband plan to donate the collection to a museum, probably in China. Mr. Rasmussen occasionally suggests selling off their lesser examples, but then Ms. Zhang reminds him that she was born in a Chinese year of the dog.
“Once I get my jaw into something, I don’t let go,” she said.

At the Museum of Chinese in America, shelves running the length of the room are piled with reproduction puzzles for visitors to try. (The collectors have trained docents to give hints.) In one display case is a set of nine interlocked jadeite rings that belonged to Pu Yi, the last Chinese emperor.

In his thousands of rooms, Ms. Zhang said, “there’s no telling if he ever played with this.”