From "made in China" to "making in China": the hidden ecologies of an eighteenth-century Chinese export shrine-desk
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
While objects of Chinese origin constitute the second largest proportion of non-American made objects in the Winterthur Museum, their ubiquity is belied by their invisibility in the interpretation of the collection. Interpretive and scholarly inattention to how Asian ecologies, materials, and hands shaped globally desired export objects points to a larger historical bias in material culture studies towards Euro-American elite consumption, and away from serious inquiry into extra-European making and design. My research, by contrast, foregrounds the role of Asian materials and craft in shaping globally mobile Chinese exports. My thesis employs a “thick description” of transformation of Asian organic materials to consider Chinese export objects as things shaped by local ecology and culture as much as their more-studied global consumption. In particular, my work centers on a peculiar eighteenth-century lacquered miniature desk-and-bookcase, a hybrid object whose exterior follows European furniture forms but whose interior features a Chinese ancestral shrine, which further conceals hidden wunderkammer-style compartments. I follow the object through its global biography, from the felling of a Chinese swamp cypress in a Southern Chinese marsh, to the timber’s transformation in a Cantonese workshop, and to the context of its display and connoisseurial (mis)-interpretation at Winterthur. Through bridging the object’s Chinese making and its “Western” consumption, the project underlines the role of Chinese agents, both human and ecological, in the creation of globally circulated goods. Highlighting the agency of Chinese artisans and biomes in shaping export objects, my project decolonizes traditional scholarly focus on Western economic and cultural desires in discussions of “chinoiserie” and the China trade, lending new insights into the “golden chain of commerce” linking China and the “West” from early modernity to today.
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Keywords
Non-American made objects, Chinese export objects, Golden chain of commerce