Page 44 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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The terms pictured the entity of China as a unified, homogenous tradition, often with

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explicit racial overtones.

Guo Taiqi, in a toast given in response to Binyon’s speech, discussed the meaning

of the art exhibition from his point of view. First, he emphasized that the “treasures”

were sent by the Chinese government “with all the goodwill of the Chinese nation.”

Although some might read this as some form of self-promoting “propaganda,” what I

wish to highlight is Guo’s stress on goodwill and the government’s purposeful actions.

Moreover, his understanding of the exhibition’s objects was inseparable from their

presentist, exigent political significance. In his view, the very action of sending objects

was what mattered. While he emphasized that the collection of objects sent over by the

government was “designed to illustrate China’s cultural development for more than 30

centuries,” Guo expressed his hope that viewers would see that Chinese artistic traditions

were “far from static,” and that they would come out of the galleries with the

understanding that the “objects of art, in style, feeling, and sense of form, [were]

remarkably modern.” Finally, according to Guo, what drove Chinese art had an

important, active role in the present social situation, for Chinese art was a “mature and

vigorous influence of the creative force that is animating China’s present national

reconstruction amid unprecedented difficulties.”

Guo made another point, too. In explaining the meaning of the Chinese

government’s participation in this art exchange, Guo, as well as his wife Madame Guo,

spoke and wrote on several occasions that the art displayed in the exhibition should

remind viewers that the Chinese were a “pacific people.” They were people who upheld

the “ideals of peace and virtue.” While these opinions might also seem to be an