Page 126 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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Through a contextualized reading of Loo’s publications and exhibition projects, this

chapter views “Westernness” and “Chineseness” as two edges of his dealing. Loo’s

manipulation of his collection’s identity was also reflected in his personal history. It is

important to note that over-simplification or generalization cannot be avoided when one

uses terms such as “Westernness” and “Chineseness”. My investigation of Loo’s dealing

is not to essentialize the West or China, but to locate the cultural collective consciousness

in a specific moment and in a specific time and place.

Westernness

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ancient Chinese art arrived in

America as a new category. In contrast to the influx of a large quantity of Chinese

antiquities was the paucity of available information about Chinese art in the West. The

central question in the reception of Chinese art in America was where to place Chinese

art in the Eurocentric art historical map in terms of lineage and aesthetics. In C. T. Loo’s

dealing, a new critical vocabulary needed to be invented to help Chinese art gain license

in the West. This was not an easy task, considering the immense geographical and

cultural distance between China and the Euro-American world. As Steven Conn

observes, compared with Rome, Greece, Egypt, Sumer, which “had a direct genealogical

relation to the civilization of Europe and the United States…Neither China nor Japan

formed part of the Western lineage” (Conn 2000, 167). There were also marked

differences between Chinese art and its Western counterpart in terms of medium,

technique, category, and aesthetics.