Page 35 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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event in Shanghai and Nanjing. It was a venue in which porcelain was the most

numerous and perhaps prominent of all object types displayed.

A central figure in this story will be Guo Baochang ெ໫׹. It includes an

account of his artistic productions, cross-cultural relationships and his writings authored

as the last Jingdezhen porcelain commissioner, or what Chinese language scholarship

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often refers to as “dutaoguan” ຖௗ֜. Guo produced over 40,000 porcelain objects

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for use in Yuan Shikai’s imperial palaces. He was the person in charge of selecting the
porcelain objects for the 1935 exhibition in London. I will analyze his account of

porcelain history in an essay published widely through periodicals as well as through

personal gifts to art collectors in the United States and England. He was on friendly

terms with exhibition organizers and advisors from Great Britain and the United States,

including the famous porcelain collector and exhibition chair, Sir Percival David, and

longtime Beijing resident, researcher of Chinese art history, and Guomindang advisor,

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John Calvin Ferguson (Figure 3).
This section begins by tracing the process of organizing and exhibiting “Chinese

art,” including the stated goals and organizing principles that set the institutional

framework through which porcelain objects from the Palace Museum collection in

Beijing could play an important role in configuring national art during the early twentieth

century. Starting with the planning of the exhibition and tracking the objects’ movement

from Shanghai to London, I analyze this event as an important instance of 1930s

Republican-era efforts to build, through visual displays, a public awareness of national art

history through the maneuvering of material objects. By tracing how the exhibit’s objects

were presented, represented, and understood in various public spaces, including print