Page 191 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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1
Percival David, “Hsiang and His Album,” Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society
11 (1933-1934): 22.

2 Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections, and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics
in Britain, 1560-1960 (London: Peter Lang, 2007).

3
Stacey Pierson points out that the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, which
opened in 1950, was the only museum completely centered on Chinese ceramics in
Britain and the only academic institution where the history of Chinese ceramics can be
studied at degree level. See the pivotal role David played in the promulgation of popular
understanding of Chinese porcelain in her book that recounts his personal and
professional history in Collectors, Collections, and Museums (2007). The foundation
has since then shut down.

4 Percival David, “Hsiang and His Album,” 22.

5
I use singular in the sense of art work that is valued from the perspective of the viewer
or beholder as something that is unique and relatedly, authentic. The idea that a piece of
Art that should not able to be reproduced is prevalent in most modern aesthetic thinking
after Kant, and the reproducibility of art is most carefully considered in Walter
Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” written in
1936. See also John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972). Walter
Benjamin, an important theorist of art and cultural history (of Europe), observed the
effect of film and other such technologies of mechanical reproduction as photography on
art’s experience. Included in the shift from handicraft and manual production of works of
art to mechanical methods, he notes a diminution of the singularity of an artwork, since
mechanically reproduced works such as prints render the need for “authenticity”
irrelevant. Whereas before, the artwork was valued as an object of cult value, the work is
now appreciated for its “exhibition value.” An artwork’s exhibition value draws attention
away from the artwork’s privileged entity to the space between the viewer and the
artwork.

6 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 98.

7
I stress the visual here because the dissertation attempts to probe theoretically and
historically, the negotiations between the visual and material aspects of perceptions about
porcelain. The nineteenth century, for instance, saw an increasing interest in glaze
technology and the proliferation of color terminology through the confluence of
collecting, museum practices, and French, Japanese, and English language research, in
understanding, appreciating, and authenticating porcelain. Painters in France worked in
tandem with the same chemists who were developing color theories based on their
research into glazes sent from Jingdezhen. Broadening the scope of nineteenth century