The Creature

The beast is a fantastic creature that does not resemble classic shell animals from China collected in Western museums: ducks with shiny white feathers made from mother-of-pearl dated to the eighteenth and the nineteenth century that often came in pairs. Some of them were originally intended for use as incense burners with the birds’ beaks as smoke holes or as boxes. Such shell birds were also made in Europe around 1600 in imitation of Asian works. German craftsmen, for example, were inspired by Indian works from Gujarat that feature surfaces of densely arranged plates of mother of pearl.

While this beast is unlike earlier examples of shell animals in European elite collections, it fits into local traditions of objects made from shells such as this shell-made dog, which appears on one of the Hong Kong stamps issued for 2018, the year of the dog.