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15 A Study of the Chinese Influence on Mexican Ceramics 263

15.6 Discussion

The majolica of New Spain that imitates Chinese porcelain shows that certain
motifs were extracted from their original context and appropriated by colonial
potters, who freely modi!ed them into elements that responded to vice regal taste
and used them indiscriminately in combination with elements of Moorish,
European, and local provenance. In colonial majolica it is not unusual to !nd
characters dressed in European garments in the middle of a scene full of oriental
motifs. The ease with which these motifs were transformed and integrated into
novel designs suggests that ornament has a certain degree of independence which
allows it to transgress cultural, temporal, and geographical boundaries. The orna-
mental motifs on Chinese ceramics, which were originally charged with meaning
and functioned within a speci!c context, were able to cross these boundaries when
they became part of the repertoire of colonial Mexican majolica. The ease with
which they were adapted and adopted to a different media full of multicultural
influences brings into question the notion proposed by Trilling (2003: 27) that
ornament is culturally bound. In the case of certain motifs, such as the dragon, the
statement seems to hold true. As mentioned above, the dragon was largely ignored
by the potters of New Spain. This fantastical creature was immensely popular in
Asian art. Its powerful symbolic associations probably contributed to make it one of
the most traditional subjects in the decoration of Chinese porcelain, and it remained
closely associated with Chinese culture wherever in Asia it was represented (Wilson
1990: 286, 298–299). What contributed to its popularity in Asian art, may have
been exactly what prevented it from being selected as a transferable motif in
colonial Mexico. Colonial potters in New Spain probably struggled making sense of
a creature that was completely unrelated to the natural world. The phoenix, in
contrast, was frequently copied in the majolica of New Spain. While the phoenix
was also a fantastic creature, it shared characteristics with birds of long tail such as
swallows which are common in central Mexico where majolica was produced,
allowing it to thrive and to become one of the most frequently depicted motifs in
colonial majolica and one that remains popular today. So while certain elements of
ornament may indeed be culture-bound, this is not always the case. It is also
important to emphasize what got lost in translation. The Buddhist and Daoist
symbols that frequently appear in Chinese porcelain were transformed into mere
decorative patterns completely devoid of meaning.
When the potters of New Spain imitated Chinese porcelain, they were attempting
to transfer the articulation of ornament and surface characteristic of Chinese
porcelain into a tin-glazed ceramic technology and their own idiosyncratic prefer-
ences. The concept of articulation, proposed by Hay (2016: 65), integrates the
notion of joining two things in a coordinated way, with the possibility of arriving to
formal coherence. Originally applied to the study of Chinese ceramics, this concept
makes it possible to study ornament in its articulated relation with the surface that it
covers or supplements. Rather than thinking of ornament as a marginal element,
what Derrida (1987: 56) calls the parergon, the whole surface is articulated with the