Date: Tuesday 3 Oct 2023
Registration: 6:30 – 7:00pm
Lecture: 7:00 – 8:00pm
Place: 2/F Chater House (Centricity-Concentric), 8 Connaught Rd Central
Dinner: 8:15pm Peking Garden (on a shared cost basis, please register in advance)
Members $200/Non-members $250
In 2021 the Oriental Ceramic Society in London awarded Professor Peter Y. K. Lam the prestigious R. C. Hills Gold Medal granted to scholars for their major contribution to the field of Asian art. Professor Lam is only the 12th recipient of this award. On this occasion, he delivered a lecture on the Eumorfopoulos phoenix-headed ewer housed in the British Museum (Acc no: 1936,1012.206). In this lecture he will update his original findings.
The ewer was formerly in the collection of George Eumorfopoulos, a key founder of the OCS. It is widely regarded as the finest example of the phoenix-headed vessel type extant so far, but its provenance and date have always inspired debate. This monumental porcelain ewer is decorated with a finely modelled phoenix-head and a design of crisply carved, punched and combed flowers and leaves inspired by metalwork. It has been dated from between the 9th and 11th centuries, with provenance as far afield as Liao territory in northern China to Yonghe in Jiangxi province, and Xicun of Guangdong province, proposed by Professor Lam in the early 1980s. In the four decades since then, Lam’s lecture will revisit the ewer in the light of discoveries of other similar ewers, shards with similar decorative techniques and new textual evidence from E-researches.
Professor Peter Y. K. Lam is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University and Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an expert in Chinese ceramics, calligraphy and later decorative arts, a member of the Min Chiu Society in Hong Kong, and an Honorary Fellow of the Beijing Palace Museum.
Professor Lam is generously presenting this lecture in support of the OCS Hong Kong. As a courtesy, we remind members that he is unable to comment on individual pieces.