Page 245 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

228

for Chen, there was no essential Chinese taste and knowledge; aesthetic understanding

was always in process.

Recently, historians of the medieval period have been preoccupied with the

phenomenon of the Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonder), which were collections of

diverse collected items enjoyed by scholars, researchers, and physicists in places such as

Antwerp or Venice in the late-sixteenth century. As actual containers with different

levels displaying various objects of natural history, exotica, paintings, and antiques, the

cabinets of wonder were self-contained worlds, a collection of objects viewed with a

metonymic purpose. The floor-to-ceiling displays of disparate objects placed side by

side functioned as a purveyor of aesthetic enjoyment reflecting the universe bounded in a

discrete space. In other words, the cabinets of wonder were a microcosm. For historians,

they are forerunners of the way in which modern subjectivities developed in that both

88
included a yearning for universal knowledge. It is interesting that the idea of the

collector from the non-West has not been treated with similar scholarly rigor. Where the

collector as connoisseur is a subject of scholarly inquiry, they continue only to speak for

“China” or Chinese taste. As the previous chapter on visual images demonstrates,

collecting universality also existed as a form of emperorship and imperial rule that

intensified during the Qianlong period.

Even more interesting is the historical process by which Chen Liu came to

encourage the importance of ideas and knowledge in modern society. Quite regrettably,

he witnessed the loss of material objects from imperial collections. Their ensuing

inaccessibility contributed to his fervent advocacy for the continuing and gradual process

of understanding porcelain. Of course, porcelain was an aspect of his own society: to