Page 52 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

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Modern Art History and a Discourse of Material Absences

Besides emphasizing the artwork’s physical properties, Chinese organizers and

viewers were more sensitive to issues of material loss and physical absence that arose

from historically specific circumstances. Rather than using aesthetic terms, reporters

imbued objects with the value of rarity. Newspaper reports attributed the high attendance

to people seeking to see “rare collections of treasures” (xishi zhencang Ҏ˰ޜᔛ.). In

press articles and viewer’s comments, these things were variously referred to as “precious

objects” (zhen pin), or “cultural artifacts” (wenwu), and “national treasures and

collections” (guobao cang). Xu Beihong ࢱేᒿ, the famous modernist painter and art

theorist, defined what he saw at the preliminary exhibit as “national treasures” because

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they were all “historically rare things” (lishi shang xi you zhi wu ዝ̦ɪ೽Ϟʘي).

Exalting objects of an art exhibition as rare is not uncommon in the language of

marketing. Like the mentality of capital and microeconomics, the urgency of scarcity

marks the work of art critics and also drives today’s art market. The theme of scarcity

did not always mark characterizations of art, as will be shown in the next chapter’s

analysis of a historical record written about Jingdezhen porcelain just over a hundred

years earlier. Still, anxieties about rarity and loss had their origins in historical

precedents. One article in the journal Peiping Chronicle in January of 1935 narrates a

point of contention between Chinese artists and intellectuals about the loan of objects to

Britain. As the report indicates, a group of Chinese cultural figures, including Liang

Sicheng, the architectural preservationist, his wife Lin Huiyin, “Chen Chung, Dean of

Public Affairs of National Tsinghua University, Mr. Hsiung Fu-hsi, a Chinese playwright,