The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum’s new Carpets and Legends project is launched with an exhibition Chinese New Year, co-organized with the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China to the Republic of Azerbaijan. Embassy staff led by Mr. Wei Jinghua, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to the Republic of Azerbaijan, will participate in the event. According to the Chinese Lunar calendar, the Year of the Dog began in February 2018. Therefore, the project linked the museum exhibits with the image of this year’s symbol. A few never-seen-before carpets from the museum fund are also presented at the exhibition.

Dog images are one of the common elements of world art. Their content in various epochs and in the art of different peoples varies from totem to a way of life.

In the ancient Chinese Art, this is a wide range of images of celestial guardian ‒ mythical dog-lion (Foo Dog) in carpet art, painting and sculpture, as well as modern clay dog ‒ the traditional fishery of Huaiyang.

The dog images are frequent on Azerbaijani carpets. The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum within the framework of the project displays several dozen of the late 19th ‒ early 20th-centuries Shirvan, Karabakh, and Gazakh carpets in the compositions and ornaments of which the dog images are somehow involved. The exposition consists of two parts: the first one exhibits carpets where images of dogs are shown realistically, while in the other they are depicted symbolically, in an encrypted form.

The dog images appear in a stylized and even fragmented form on such Azerbaijani carpets as Maraza, Gazakh, and Shirvan. On such carpets “dog” patterns can carry a deep and even totemic meaning stretching back to earliest times.

Carpets and Legends. Chinese New Year exhibition will run until February 28.

More information:

www.azcarpetmuseum.az

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