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Art Review

Making Quite a Show of Dying

Theater, Life, and the Afterlife, at China Institute, includes this carved brick of a Shehuo performance from the Jin dynasty.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

To Christians in the Middle Ages, dying was the equivalent of a giddy elevator ride. You either shot straight up to an air-conditioned luxury penthouse, dropped down to the basement boiler room or got stuck on a stuffy mezzanine, from which, with luck and lots of prayers said by family and friends, you might eventually rise.

In China of the 12th and 13th centuries death was thought of differently. What you hoped for, even expected, when you breathed your last was to go nowhere in particular, indeed to stay, with minor adjustments, right where you were.

Tombs were designed to put you in accustomed surroundings, in a mirror image of the home you’d always known. There you could continue to oversee household tasks, enjoy favorite meals and, in the long afterlife evenings, be entertained by the medieval version of network television: live actors performing comedy skits and dramatic mini-series right there in your living room.

In short, death was life, but better: no colds, no taxes. And there was no reason to think that this new-old life would ever change.

Of course it did change. Time, accident and human meddling saw to that. One day a farmer digging for water puts his shovel through your roof. Next your house is swarming with strangers. They make off with your clothes, chairs and dinner plates.

Your musicians and actors are whisked away, and, like them, the life you’d assumed was eternal is gone.

Occasionally, though, a semblance of that life can be reconstituted, and it has been at China Institute in “Theater, Life, and the Afterlife: Tomb Décor of the Jin Dynasty from Shanxi,” an exhibition with all the virtues of the best shows there. It’s ideally scaled for concentrated looking. It’s made up of rarely seen material, all from the impressive Shanxi provincial museum in northern China and atmospherically installed by the gallery’s director, Willow Weilan Hai Chang.

And the art is astonishing: some of it fine, some of it rough, all of it made for the life beyond, all of it bursting with life in the here and now.

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The head of a figure in the exhibition.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

The now for which most of it was conceived was the Jin dynasty, from 1115 to 1234.

Semi-nomadic people from Manchuria, the Jin had a twisty history in China. They initially arrived as horse traders to a dynasty called the Liao, but in the early 12th century teamed up with a rival dynasty, the North Song, to wipe out the Liao. A few years later the Jin turned on the Song, pushed them south and declared northern China their own.

A stretch of relative peace followed, though it didn’t last long. The Song regrouped and began to exert steady pressure. Mongol forces, which would form the next Chinese empire, the Yuan, began assaults from the north. For the Jin what had gone around came around. In 1232 the Mongols and the Song joined forces and defeated them, after which the Jin were absorbed into China as a whole.

Absorption was easy. During their decades in power the Jin had gradually modified their tribal ways and adopted Song customs and enthusiasms. The customs included funerary practices based on the idea of treating the dead as if they were alive. Among the enthusiasms was a taste for theater, which the Jin turned into a dynastic craze, one that filtered down to all levels of society, urban and rural, and was integrated into the business-as-usual life of the grave.

Jin graves were simply constructed, with decoration mostly in the form of relief carvings on bricks, some 80 examples of which make up the show, organized by Ms. Chang and Shi Jinming, director of the Shanxi Museum.

Brick carving was essentially a folk medium, but Jin artists made an elaborate, often elegant thing of it, especially in their serial depictions of stage figures and scenes from plays. Of the hundred or so Jin tombs uncovered in Shanxi Province in the past half-century most were equipped with what amounted to sculptured home theaters. In the most recent of these discoveries, excavated in 2009 and reassembled at China Institute, a ministage, replete with actors, is the dominant feature.

Although one of the show’s most captivating opening images is not taken from theater per se, it certainly is dramatic. It’s a high-relief sculpture of a small figure of a woman standing half inside and half outside a slightly open double door, as if she’d just responded to a knock but felt shy about venturing out.

No one knows the real meaning here. If the entrance to a grave can be taken as the point of transition between two realities, earthly and other, this is a haunting emblem of that idea.

And once beyond the door, inside the tomb, the other life starts. Its practical details are established in a series of square bricks carved with emblems of domestic life. A woman draws water from a well; another steams buns in a kitchen. Wine vessels sit on table. A mirror hangs from a stand, ready to catch the reflection of the lady of the house as she prepares herself for an evening’s entertainment.

Entertainment is what she gets, and we get, in the reliefs in the rest of the show. There’s a warm-up procession of musicians beating drums, clapping wood clappers and piping away on flutes. They’re followed by zany peasant dancers, and children, or actors playing children, who stage mock battles on horses constructed from paper and bamboo.

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A reconstructed tomb of carved bricks from the Shanxi Province of the Jin dynasty is part of an exhibition at China Institute.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

The racket subsides a bit when the Eight Daoist Immortals appear, bearded, fat and eccentric, like so many Falstaffs. Finally the evening’s actors arrive, figures as distinctive and unnuanced as commedia dell’arte personnel: the blandly handsome leading man; the high-ranking official, nose in the air; the clown, leering, grinning, staggering around; his clueless straight man; and finally, plump, demure and bewigged, the one female character, played by a man.

It says something about the care that went into funerary art that these types, while always recognizable, never look exactly the same from one example to the next. It also says a lot about the range and vitality of Jin theater that it could encompass blowzy parades, drawing-room farce and Confucian narratives dramatizing the challenges and rewards of filial piety.

The show has a sequence of two dozen such moralizing scenes. Summarily shaped and sketchily painted, they’re hardly masterpieces. But they work as an ensemble, which is what most of the art here was meant to do, the clearest example being the reassembled tomb in the second gallery.

Rectangular and about the size of a walk-in closet, with barely room for a bed or bier, it has, at one end, a sculpture of a door, this one tightly shut and flanked by the somber figures of a man and woman, possibly portraits of the unidentified husband and wife for whom the tomb was built.

The reliefs of lattice windows and pots of peonies on the long walls may well capture the House Beautiful ambience of upper-class Jin homes. By comparison the entrance wall looks bare, with nothing but a low, cutout door and a niche with four standing figures. Yet those figures are clearly the focus of the ensemble, where the eye is meant to land.

Sculptured almost in the round, they are the standard characters of Jin drama: leading man, straight man, official, clown. And they are poised, as if on the lip of a stage, to take a collective bow in the direction of the tomb’s tenants, whose bodies, it was discovered when the grave was opened, had been positioned to face them.

But are the players really lined up for a curtain call? Hands clasped, all looking as if they were about to speak, they could be announcing a new play that’s about to begin.

Which one? We know almost nothing about contents of Jin-era drama, and maybe the couple who called the tomb home didn’t either. Maybe they trusted performers to play what they wished, even make scripts up as they went along.

“Enchant us,” the tomb owners asked. “Just enchant us!” Their actors, as embodied in Jin art, no doubt did so.

Centuries later, with a new audience, in a different world, they continue to.

“Theater, Life, and the Afterlife: Tomb Décor of the Jin Dynasty From Shanxi” runs through June 17 at China Institute, 125 East 65th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-8181, chinainstitute.org/gallery.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Making Quite a Show of Dying. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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