Recarving China's past

The New York Times reviews a museum exhibit currently on display of stone carvings from an ancient Chinese cemetery. From the review:

When you enter the darkened installation, you're in the tomb, surrounded by mural-size rubbings that speak of where you've been and where you've arrived. They include vibrant images in black silhouette of the natural world: lush gardens, soaring birds, gesticulating figures. The animation has a decorative, patterlike, stop-action stiffness. This isn't life on parade; it's life in procession, moving to a grave rhythm. As Mr. Liu suggests in the Princeton catalog - and in the catalog for a related exhibition, "Providing for the Afterlife: 'Brilliant Artifacts' From Shandong," which he has organized with Susan L. Beningson at China Institute Gallery in Manhattan - the Han may have seen the tomb as a way station between mortal life and some final, unchanging condition of deathlessness. And they designed it accordingly. Tombs for the wealthy had stables, lavatories and storage rooms with windows and doors, all of which resembled earthly counterparts but were nonfunctional. The same applied to funerary objects, known as mingqi, or "brilliant artifacts." Some 60 from Princeton's rich collection make up the bulk of the show, among them models of cooking stoves, wellheads, pet dogs and a ceramic fief of farms, villages and watchtowers. Equivalent forms are also found in the Wu shrine rubbings on the gallery walls. And their depiction supports Mr. Liu's theory that the Han conceived of their tombs as total, balanced environments, walk-in "brilliant artifacts," and bastions of harmony in an afterlife fraught with the same stresses experienced in earthly life: the dead had to pay stiff netherworld taxes, and appear in court if called. span>