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Dissection, Self-Mutilation and
Painted Tea Cups
Collecting Chinese Export Ware
in Seventeenth-Century
Holland
Dawn Odell, Virginia Polytechnic
and State University
Tea, rather than porcelain, was the
commodity most heavily imported
from China into the Dutch Republic
in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, but porcelain
is the material good that survives
in large quantities today, and its
decorated surface presents some of
the most important visual evidence
for how aesthetic taste was
articulated, commodified and
exchanged between China and Europe
in the early modern period.
Inspired by new methodological
approaches employed by historians
of Chinese art to re-frame how we
understand the status and meaning
of decorated porcelains in the Ming
and Qing dynasties, my paper will
examine several examples of
seventeenth and eighteenth-century
Chinese export ware special ordered
for the Dutch market. These
wares include tea sets decorated
with images of violent
self-mutilation, Crucifixions, and
dissected fetuses, among other
surprising motifs. Many of
these pieces show almost no
evidence of wear, suggesting that
their purpose was aesthetic
(display) rather than practical
(use). But can such a
division between purposes be
sustained? To what degree
were viewers in both China and
Europe conditioned to read the
imagery decorating ceramics, even
those ceramics permanently set on a
shelf or fixed to a wall, as
narrative fields intersecting with
their lives as users (as well as
viewers) and referencing rituals of
consumption?
In responding to these questions,
and drawing connections between the
objects’ implied use and the
imagery decorating their surface, I
also intend to emphasize the degree
to which the decoration on
porcelain must be understood not
simply as pattern but as a means of
conveying more complex narrative
significance. The surface of
porcelain, I argue, becomes an
innovative venue for imagery
derived from sources – scientific,
historical, popular and fine art –
formerly considered distinct fields
of representation. In a
sense, rules had not yet been
established for this new kind of
object, which was shaped,
decorated, and marketed
specifically to travel across
cultural boundaries while
emphasizing certain aspects of
cultural distinction.
Finally, my paper will address some
of the ways in which the collection
and display of Chinese porcelain in
Holland, while appearing to promote
the translation of visual style
from one culture to another also
welcomed the aesthetic concerns of
the socially elite (as opposed to
the culturally foreign) into a
domestic sphere created by a
middle-class merchant
economy. In this context, to
appreciate a piece of porcelain was
not merely to approve of a picture
affixed to a plate but to invent
anew what it means to consume a
work of art as an aesthetic object.
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