Page 25 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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technique of production, they also showed how porcelain was an object portrayed as the

sum of its parts. In this sense, Qianlong’s visual representations of porcelain were a part

of a larger mission to transmit an emperor-centric omniscience and ubiquity, also a

phenomenon exemplified by court art collecting and vigorous cataloguing efforts.

Similar aesthetic modes, reflected in export paintings and imperial albums, traveled the

global stage at roughly the same time but for very different purposes. This chapter

presents an outline of this simultaneous global visual culture of porcelain.

The last chapter brings us to the end of the nineteenth century with an analysis of

the views of a late-Qing collector and official, Chen Liu. His text on porcelain, Tao Ya,

was both an aesthetic and social commentary. Over two-hundred pages long and written

in literary Chinese, Tao Ya was most influential for later studies focusing on the history

of porcelain in the Qing era, especially the reigns of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and

Qianlong emperors. Without any systematic organization, the author’s thoughts on

porcelain glazes, their appearance, the nature of porcelain bodies, foreign tastes,

international expositions, and instructions about identifying fakes form a hodgepodge of

notes and come together to form his tome on ceramics. The chapter sifts through his

morass of opinions and observations in order to shed light on his social commentary,

which reveals an internationally informed porcelain appreciator. His views revealed an

epistemological framework embedded in modern notions of time and focused on the

present and future possibilities of his society and porcelain. While his subject matter

made him look like an antiquarian, Chen was not a man who wanted to remain in the

past. I show how the actual conditions in which he lived enabled him to view and judge

porcelain, including the forced opening of imperial palace collections. Ultimately, the