The traditional furniture collection, since the reform and opening up, has been playing triumphantly and rapidly, especially the Ming-style huanghuali products, which are now well known to everyone and unprecedented.
In the 1980s and 1990s, people's understanding of traditional furniture was still close to blank. A "Ming-style Furniture Appreciation" opened the door to common Ming-style utensils. Since then, the flat head case, the warp case, the circle chair, the official hat chair, the rounded corner cabinet, the square corner cabinet, etc., have deeply affected people's cognition, which must be called classics, becoming the mainstream in the following two decades, and promoting the rapid development of the collectibles market.
However, everything in the world is always the opposite of things, yin and yang. Common styles were initially regarded as classics, gradually became ordinary, and finally became popular models; rare types were initially not valued, but there was a possibility of scarcity, and once the market laws came into play, some became sky-high collections.
Common and rare, more or less extant, the two complement each other, have commonalities, and are the attributes of every piece of Huanghuali furniture. In recent years, the main Ming-style instrument types have become well known, and collectors' attention has shifted to changing styles and niche types.
In the case of Huanghuali armchairs, for example, the one-sided board and the three-fold backrest are the absolute majority of the circle chairs or official hat chairs, with few exceptions. Every new change adds value to the collection and is very popular in the market.
The gall wood monoplate is embedded in the yellow pear border, the shape and contour have not changed, but the similarity is not other than that. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the Huanghuali four-headed official hat chair was sold for more than five million yuan, which was four years ago.
On the contrary, it is obviously a single board backrest, but it is carved into a three-saving style, and the pair of Huanghuali furnace bottle pattern circle chairs have been auctioned for more than seven million yuan.
The list goes on and on. Classic styles are no longer rare, huanghuali rarely have attracted attention, and collectors are more interested in orphans than ever before.
The next question is, how do you tell if a variant is normative or unconventional?