Relief or shallow carving is mostly the pattern on the utensils, the most common are Taotie pattern, Kui dragon pattern and cloud thunder pattern. In addition, there are cicada pattern, owl pattern, bird pattern, silkworm pattern, turtle and fish pattern, as well as ox head pattern, deer head pattern, tiger head pattern, etc., all of which are based on animal images. After ingenious artistic processing, they become portraits with unique style of the times. The bronze statue of dragon and tiger, discovered in Funan, Anhui Province, has a double body with relief dragon and tiger patterns on the shoulder and abdomen. The tiger pattern is open mouth and teeth, salty and cannibal, which can be called the representative work of decorative patterns in Shang Dynasty.
The half three-dimensional animal statues are generally small and exquisite, which are worn by slave owners and nobles. These sculptures are mostly jade, stone and mussel ornaments, including bird, fish, cicada, owl, rabbit, tiger and other unknown animal faces.
In the early Shang Dynasty, only clay sculptures were found. It was not until the late Shang Dynasty that a large number of animal statues of various materials were found. There are the largest number of animal shaped statues made of jade and stone, with the widest range of subjects. For example, the jade statue with long nose and big ears and the stone ox crouching on its feet recently found in M5 of Xiaotun are all vivid and vivid. A large number of animal shaped white stone statues have also been found in the tombs around the village of military officials. The largest one is more than one meter long, and the smaller one is more than 30 cm high, such as the stone owl, the stone tiger head, and the sitting tiger claw. Although these stone three-dimensional animal statues were decorated beside the pillars in the late Yin Dynasty, they are still the art treasures of more than 3000 years ago. In addition, some bronze wares in the late Shang Dynasty, such as bird and beast Zun, Gong, shaped you, etc., were modeled after animal images. In particular, the four sheep Zun unearthed in Ningxiang, Hunan, skillfully combined the shape and layout of the four sheep with the shape characteristics of the square shoulder Zun, reaching a very high level of art.
In the early Shang Dynasty, only one clay sculpture fragment was found. In the late Shang Dynasty, all kinds of relief, semi three-dimensional and three-dimensional figure sculptures were unearthed. For example, the Fuhao Ding pattern found in M5 of Xiaotun tomb in Anyang recently, the dragon and tiger Zun pattern unearthed in Funan, Anhui Province, and you (you) unearthed in Anhua, Hunan Province are similar to the ear pattern in Si Mu Wu Ding, which put the head or human body in the mouth of Taotie or under the mouth of tiger, reflecting the cannibal image of slave society.
Among the Ten Jade full-length figures and human heads found in the above-mentioned Xiaotun M5, some are kneeling and wearing crowns with broad waistband; some are barefoot and curled hair with naked tattoos; the three clay figurines of men and women with flail mentioned in the previous section are bareheaded and wearing round collars, and the dresses seem to be connected together, which clearly shows different social identities from these different costumes.
The musical instruments of the Shang Dynasty have been found, such as Qing, Cuan (made of stone, pottery and bone), drum and tongrao (shaped like a bell but without tongue, holding a percussion, three in size as a set), etc. In oracle bone inscriptions, there is the word "Yue" in the form of Congxi congmu, which shows that Qin and se also existed at that time. The oracle bone inscriptions also have the word "dance" in the form of "dance", which is like dancing with ornaments on a person's body.
Marxist classic writers once pointed out: "the thoughts of the ruling class are dominant in every era.". All kinds of sculptures in the Shang Dynasty were permeated with the ideas of the slave owners, but these exquisite works of art were the great creations of the working people at that time, which showed their high wisdom and extraordinary artistic ability, and reflected that they were not only the creators of material wealth, but also the creators of spiritual culture.
