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An ivory medical doll with a wooden base A Chinese medical doll , also known as a diagnostic doll or " Doctor's lady ", is a type of small sculpture of a female figure, historically used in China and parts of Asia as a diagnostic tool .
A puzzle ball on display at the Overseas Museum, Bremen. A Chinese puzzle ball, sometimes known as a devil's work ball (Chinese: 鬼工球; pinyin: guǐ gōng qiú) or the Concentric Ball (Chinese: 同心球; pinyin: tóng xīn qiú), is a Chinese-made artifact that consists of a number of intricately carved concentric hollow spheres carved from a single solid block that fit within one another ...
Today, the market for Chinese art, both antique and contemporary, is widely reported to be among the hottest and fastest-growing in the world, attracting buyers all over the world. [ 58 ] [ 59 ] [ 60 ] The Voice of America reported in 2006 that modern Chinese art is raking in record prices both internationally and in domestic markets, some ...
In December 2007, the sale of the Guennol Lioness, a statue from around 3000 BC, nearly doubled the previous record price when it sold for $57.2 million. It is the fifth-most valuable sculpture to date (2018) and the most valuable piece from antiquity.
Zhang Qian (−114 BCE) too, the famous traveler to the western regions, had rudimentary stone statues of lions placed at his mausoleum. [11] [12] These precursors of Chinese monumental stone sculpture were probably influenced by their forays deep into Central Asia, where they probably encountered cultures using stone statues. [11]
Ivory has been valued since ancient times in art or manufacturing for making a range of items from ivory carvings to false teeth, piano keys, fans, and dominoes. [9] Elephant ivory is the most important source, but ivory from mammoth , walrus , hippopotamus , sperm whale , orca , narwhal and warthog are used as well.
Ivory was not a prestigious material in the rather strict hierarchy of Chinese art, where jade had always been far more highly regarded, and rhinoceros horn (which was not ivory) had a special auspicious meaning. [5] But ivory, as well as bone, had been used for various items since early times when China still had its own species of elephant.
For all these reasons, the figures have not shared in the huge increase in Chinese art prices since the 1990s, which has been driven by Chinese collectors. The record price for a horse remains £3,740,000, [77] from a sale by the British Rail Pension Fund at Sotheby's in 1989. In 2002 the dealer who had sold this piece to the pension fund in ...