Page 242 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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Bushell’s words show how he interpreted the Chinese collector’s taste as a penchant for

antiquity, an impression that influenced later scholars’ critique of Chinese aesthetics.

Moreover, while they were living in the same cities and geographical areas, sharing

neighborhoods and friends, Bushell and the circle of western collectors reified the

Chinese collector as an “antiquarian” and divested him of voice, narrowing the scope of

Chinese collectors’ ideas to cultural essence. In scholarly works, backward-looking

aesthetics bore the brunt of a backward Chinese culture. Tao Ya’s existence at this time

period as a written text about art, taste, and knowledge dissuade us from seeing “Chinese

aesthetics” as an invariable paradigm but rather one constructed and deployed with

intention. A look at the terms of Tao Ya’s discussion reveals the uneasy fit between

imperial, personal, and national notions of “Chinese porcelain.”

As noted, the Xiang catalogue was an album Tao Ya’s author respected. It is one

of the few texts on porcelain that aspired to be a comprehensive history of porcelain

styles that had been produced at the time of the author’s life in the sixteenth century. The

narrative of the preface stretches the history of ceramics back to the pre-historic stone age

with Emperor Shun as a moral potter as well as farmer and fisher. Moreover, the

collector, Xiang, wrote that his collection included extant works from the Yuan, Song,

and Ming dynasties, all of which he treasured as much as he did ancient bronzes ritual

objects. The preface, supposedly written by the collector Xiang himself, divulged a

similar willingness to engage in studying and identifying collected porcelain as an

honorable activity, ending with an exhortation: “Don’t regard this activity as simply an

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old man who has reverted to liking a child’s leisure activity.”