The name applied to a class of surface patterns common on Chinese Eastern Zhou bronzes of the 6th-3rd centuries bc. Cast in relief, these dense arrays of hooks and curls — Loehr’s ‘graceful froth of the Huai style’ — derive from tight configurations of dragons but verge on complete abstraction. The style owes its name to finds made in and around Shou Xian on the Huai River; while by-and-large the Shou Xian bronzes are not early examples, there is some reason to believe that the typical Huai-style patterns were invented in this region. The basis in dragon configurations is a feature that the Huai style shares with the contemporary Liyu style, but while the Liyu patterns stress interlace and contrasting surface textures, the Huai style exploits high relief to obtain a uniformly frothy, or gritty or prickly texture in which interlace plays little role. In its early (6th century) manifestations, the Huai style might be viewed as a Yangzi-region counterpart to the Liyu designs of North China; by the 5th century bc it had been adopted in the north. The most outstanding Huai-style designs, including extraordinary examples from Sui Xian, belong to the 5th century, which also saw the appearance of stereotyped low-relief versions that enjoyed a lasting vogue as backgrounds for other motifs. Of these standardized patterns the most familiar is Yetts’ ‘feather-curl’, a very common background on mirrors of the 5th-3rd centuries bc. The Western literature of Chinese art and archaeology abounds with varying definitions of the Huai style, most of them broader than that given above. In the 1930s, Bernhard Karlgren took the term to signify a period style applicable to the whole of China for the years c650-200 bc, so that it included many forms of ornament unconnected with the Huai region, such as the Liyu More recent definitions equate the Huai style with the art of the lower Yangzi region or, less plausibly, with the art of the Chu state; though narrower in scope, these definitions are open to the same fundamental objection as Karlgren’s, namely that they group under a single heading widely different and sometimes quite unrelated designs.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied