Page 177 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

162 Greg M. Thomas
counterparts, and that would represent Eugénie’s cultural sophistication by not just
displaying her Chinese collection but using it to create an original aesthetic experience
of her own.

Conclusion

Historians of Western art tend to think of ornament as background or supplement,
a Kantian parergon whose function is to focus attention and meaning on the image
or display that is being ornamented. 58 In a case like the Chinese Museum, orna ment
clearly plays a more central role, dominating visual experience and blurring the
boundaries between object and frame. Unlike modern museum designers fore -
grounding the objects on view, the Chinese Museum’s designers worked more like
installation artists, composing an ensemble that conveyed active dialogue between
objects and frames and between themselves and their Chinese counterparts. This
dynamic visual and cultural interplay elevates ornament to a distinct form of creative
visual expression, one better theorized by historians of non-Western art. Martin
Powers, for example, writes about ancient Chinese ornament conferring status on its
owners, a function that could find resonance in French royal culture; the symbolism
of gilding and dragons was one thing easily transferred from Xianfeng to Eugénie. 59
Oleg Grabar’s notion of ornament as mediation helps illuminate how cloisonné
decoration could communicate Qing political power through Buddhist religious
utensils, and also how those utensils could be appropriated in turn for Eugénie’s own
60
imperial identification. At the material level, ornament created close affinity between
Chinese and French craftsmen and collectors. The tactile pleasure that Jonathan Hay
has shown to underlie Chinese porcelain aesthetics, for example, was an experience
and a value that could be fully appreciated in France, across linguistic and cultural
barriers. 61
To modern viewers accustomed to sacral museum aesthetics, the Chinese Museum’s
intrusive ornament easily smacks of imperialist denigration of an exotic other. I see
it instead as a sincere attempt by Eugénie and her craftsmen to generate aesthetic
dialogue with Chinese imperial culture, to construct an image of the Yuanmingyuan
as a site of cultural compatibility. Nations engage in cultural transfers in spite of—
and often because of—military and economic confrontation. And while the looting
of the Yuanmingyuan extended French violence against China, it also highlighted
structural similarities between French and Chinese imperial formations. It could only
raise Eugénie’s prestige even higher to deploy her artists in her palace to pay homage
to the Chinese emperor’s artists in his palace. Ornament facilitated this elite self-
reflection by linking and uniting Chinese and French aesthetic systems.

Notes

1 Financial assistance for this study was provided by a General Research Fund grant from
the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
2 “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,”
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Vol. 7, issue 2 (Autumn 2008) (http://19thc-
artworldwide.org). Other major studies of the Museum include: Colombe Samoyault-
Verlet, “Fontainebleau, le Musée chinois de l’impératrice Eugénie,” L’Estampille. L’objet
d’art. No. 254 (January 1992): 60–69; Colombe Samoyault-Verlet et al., Le Musée chinois
de l’impératrice Eugénie (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994); Chang Wan-Chen,