Page 126 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands” 111
in the hope of being able to display it with more appropriate interpretation at a future
point. The brevity of the label, a product of a design scheme implemented across a
gallery of several hundred artefacts rather than of any conscious or unconscious
curatorial omission, combined with the difficulty of reading the inscriptions on the
ewer body sitting behind the reflective glass of the display case, meant that the sig -
nificance of the ewer and its provenance may well have escaped visitors over the
nearly decade long period of its display. It was conspicuously inconspicuous—viewed
and noticed certainly as an artifact on display among others in a display of mainly
late imperial Chinese artefacts, but in a curious echo of the Museum Register entry
of 1884, the textual and historic signifiers surrounding the ewer were curiously elided
in a public exhibit in which the formal qualities of the ewer became privileged in a
display, which primarily functioned visually and aesthetically rather than historically.
During the same period in which the ewer sat on display between 1996 and 2008,
apparently unremarked in terms of its provenance, the legacy of the Yuanmingyuan
suddenly re-emerged into sharp relief on the international stage. As one commentator
summarily observed:

The destruction of the imperial summer palace of Yuanmingyuan by foreign
troops in 1860, and the resulting plunder in which cartloads of imperial treasures
were removed and sent to Europe, marked a significant episode in China’s modern
history. The incident is still cited in the twenty-first century. Instigating animo -
sity between east and west, and stirring up feelings of patriotism, and nowhere
is this drama played out more vibrantly than on the Chinese art and antiquities
market. 57

Museum objects can and do repeatedly become subject to reinterpretations of many
kinds through continuously renegotiated and inevitably implicit and subjective
processes of institutional reframing, imposition, juxtaposition, and elision or omission,
which can result in the loss of original cultural understandings and meanings. The
greater the historical remove, the greater the possibility of losses and shifts of this
kind occurring. The events which took place at the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 are,
however, very well documented, and the Hope Grant Ewer is itself unusually forth -
coming—in contrast to the comparatively mute standards of most museum objects—
about both its provenance and the circumstances of its transfer of ownership, and
in proclaiming upon the surface of the object itself the pivotal moment in its cultural
biography. Writing about the curating and display of African objects, Susan Vogel
has commented:

The fact that museums recontextualise and interpret objects is a given, requiring
no apologies. They should, however, be self-aware and open about the degree of
subjectivity that is also given. Museum professionals must be conscious about
what they do and why, and they should inform the public that what it sees is not
material that “speaks for itself” but material filtered through the tastes, interests,
politics, and state of knowledge of particular presenters at a particular moment
in time. The museum must allow the public to know that it is not a broad frame
through which the art and culture of the world can be inspected, but a tightly
focussed lens that shows the visitor a particular point of view. It could hardly be
otherwise. 58