Ko-sometsuke covered box with erotic decoration, China, late Ming dynasty or Transitional period, 17th century

Small covered porcelain box painted in underglaze blue, belonging to the group known as ko-sometsuke 小染付, a term applied to Chinese blue and white porcelains produced in Jingdezhen for the Japanese market, between the end of the Wanli period and the Transitional period. These pieces, often small in format, freely drawn, sometimes deliberately irregular in their silhouette or layout, occupy a special place in the history of Japanese taste. They were prized not only for their use, but for their ability to combine refinement, fantasy, and strangeness in the world of chanoyu. The development of these productions is now well placed between the reigns of Wanli and Chongzhen, that is, in the last moment of the Ming dynasty and in the so-called transition phase.

This box belongs to the category of small containers used for incense, which Japan imbued with its own aesthetic value. In tea culture, these objects were not only used but classified, compared, described, and hierarchized, to the point of giving rise to a true connoisseurs' literature. The most famous work is the Katamono Kōgō sumō banzuke of 1855, a classification established by tea masters, merchants, and connoisseurs from several major Japanese cities, which demonstrates the extraordinary prestige accorded to kōgō 香合, these small incense boxes, and more broadly to small Chinese containers integrated into the world of tea. This document clearly shows that in Japan, the smallness of an object did not imply less dignity; on the contrary, it fostered extreme attention to the form, surface, subject, and memory of famous examples.

It is in this context that the exceptional interest of this box must be understood. The decoration depicts an erotic scene in an interior, which is already very rare on Chinese porcelain of this period. The literature also emphasizes the exceptional nature of explicitly erotic porcelains from the late Ming and Transitional periods. But the uniqueness of this piece lies not only in the choice of subject. It also lies in its formulation. The couple is not intertwined. The scene is therefore not organized according to a demonstrative frontality; it is rather an allusive, condensed, almost restrained image, which brings it closer to a culture of suggestion than to a purely narrative iconography.

Above all, it must be emphasized that the decoration is not relegated to the interior of the object or reserved for a secondary discovery: it is placed on the lid itself, therefore on the most immediately visible side. This is a considerable fact. For in this domain, erotic images are most often intended for intimate consultation, for browsing, for private use, as was the case with painted or printed albums of the late Ming, designated by the terms chunhua 春畫 or chungonghua 春宮畫. James Cahill's studies on late Ming erotic printed albums have clearly shown the existence of an autonomous, sophisticated visual repertoire, where the refinement of attitudes, interiors, and relationships between figures counted as much as the explicit itself. The box must be recontextualized within this culture of circulating models. It seems to condense, on a very small surface, something of this visual language disseminated by late Ming albums, paintings, and collections of images.

Here lies another of its paradoxes. The subject is not hidden, as it occupies the top of the lid; but the object, due to its minuscule format, could easily be held, shown, or withdrawn from view in a limited setting. This tension between iconographic visibility and material discretion is essential. It distinguishes the piece from a simple object with a licentious subject. We are rather in front of a cabinet object, intended for an informed viewer, in which the small scale, the preciousness of the support, and the condensation of the motif play together.

By the chosen subject, by the unconcealed position of the decoration on the lid, by the relatively restrained treatment of the scene—the couple not being intertwined—and by its inclusion in the world of ko-sometsuke appreciated in Japan, this small box constitutes a rare and intellectually very interesting testimony to the exchanges between the visual culture of the late Ming and the Japanese tradition of appreciating small containers.

Dimensions: width 4 cm; depth 3 cm; height 2 cm.