Page 20 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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further studied by most scholars in China. The objects Loo handled and their relevant

documents are now dispersed in private hands and at over twenty institutions around the

world.

The study of Loo is further hindered by the rising nationalistic sentiment in China,

where Loo is remembered as a culprit for the depletion of the nation’s cultural heritage.

The issue concerning the ownership of the Chinese antiquities he notoriously channeled

into America can potentially raise serious concerns in the U.S.-China relations over the

time.

Though a considerable amount of critical literature on museology and art

historiography has been produced (Becker 1982, Vergo 1989, Pearce 1992, 1994,

Wallach 1998), the tendency to detach a Chinese art object from its social life, especially

its life as a commodity, has not completely disappeared in the museum and academic

world. Although biographical and historical writing on dealers and collectors of Chinese

art is plentiful (Lawton 1991,1995), literature that examines the formation of Chinese art

in America from a critical perspective is virtually absent. For a large part of the twentieth

century in the West, Chinese art was more or less a totalizing, unchanging, and

unquestioning notion. While a critical historiography of Chinese art in the U.S. remains

to be written, this dissertation attempts to answer the following questions: In Loo’s

dealing how and why did the collection and the concept of Chinese art shift in a cross-

cultural context over time? What were the strategies and techniques Loo deployed to

construct and merchandise “Chinese art” in America between the 1910s and 1950s?