Bird

This three-dimensional bird in greenish toned material with light green and honey-brown patches has a large crack beneath one of the wings. Its much simplified form is smoothed, with an oval head, two folded wings depicted by curved grooves stretching from the sides of the chest downward, and crescent-shaped legs slightly raised on the sides of the belly. The short beak is emphasized by the soft relief throughout the middle section of the head. There are no sharp edges nor refined lines to delineate the bird's features; rather, a careful polishing of the entire body and a characteristically streamlined form seem to have been the craftsman's pursuit.
The bird image in Chinese art is an ancient one. Produced at the same time as painted representations, three-dimensional birds sculpted from clay and stone go back to the neolithic period, as witnessed in the Hemudu culture along the lower valley of the Yangzi River (5000-3000 BC) and in the slightly later Dawenkou culture (4300-2400 BC), whose bird-and-sun motif carved on ivory is thought to be the source of the primitive belief that was passed over to the Liangzhu culture, in the border zone of Zhejiang and Jiangsu (3400-2200 BC). In the northeast, around Liaoning and Inner Mongolia, the Hongshan culture (3500-2200 BC) is well known for having produced jade pendants in the shape of birds with spread wings. Scholars question whether the distribution of jade birds along the eastern coastal zone was related to the sun-bird motif of the Liangzhu culture or to the ancient myth of wild-birdmen which originated in the eastern region.
(published: d'Argence 1977: 16)