Page 125 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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CHAPTER 3: WESTERNNESS AND CHINESENESS

“…any great art is not only beyond time but it is also not limited to place.” (A.B.L.

1947,59)

While Chapters One and Two concern primarily the market, Chapters Three and Four

concentrate on C. T. Loo’s negotiation of Chinese art knowledge in academic and

museological discourse. Loo’s powerful and lasting imprint on the Chinese art world was

due not only to his superb salesmanship, but also, to a large extent, to his ingenuity in

manipulating and merchandising Chinese art knowledge in the U.S. As a dealer of

ancient Chinese art in the modern West, C. T. Loo faced two major conceptual issues.

One was how to bridge the spatial gap between China and the Euro-American world, and

the other, how to overcome the temporal distance between ancient art and modern

society. This section considers C. T. Loo as a “cultural broker”, who situationally

capitalized on the boundaries between Chinese and Western, between ancient and

modern. It is important to note that terms such as Chinese/Western, ancient/modern are

not mutually exclusive, but interlocking and dynamic sets of analytical categories.

Chapter Three examines the ways in which Loo negotiated Chinese art’s identity in

America from a spatial-cultural perspective. On the one hand, the immense geographical

and cultural distance between China and America necessitated the need to incorporate

Chinese art into Western art historical discourse in terms of origination, developmental

pattern, and aesthetics. On the other, the emphasis on the native context and study

methods was important to enhance its authenticity and exotic charm of Chinese art.