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Taking into account the perspectives and reactions of Chinese viewers and

members of the Chinese Special Committee demonstrates that Western views, while

perhaps dominant, did not dominate. The opinions and priorities of Chinese organizers

offer a critique not only of Western Orientalist notions of China, but also of modernist

notions of art and society as dominated by visuality. Reflecting on the role of visual

sense in modern society, Walter Benjamin emphasized the way the city and its new

institutions, including the exhibition, the panorama, and the museum, created a sort of

commodification on display in which capitalism now put a greater premium on display

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than on use or exchange value. Rather than visual concerns, Chinese organizers and

viewers seized upon the materiality of objects to counter British definitions of art and

concepts of “China.” Certainly, they subjected art exhibition objects to a nationalist

framework. However, their awareness of cultural objects as material things to be

possessed, used, researched, given, and handled only stimulated their desire for scientific

methods of art historical research. Even different methods of display - the English

arranged objects uniformly along a progressive temporal framework while Palace

Museum researchers preferred object-based categories or geography-centered galleries -

demonstrate a view of art history held by Chinese organizers structured by the physical

and materialist nature of artworks. Visual images did dominate in the case of the

Nanjing post-exhibition, where photographs of artifacts exhibited in London lent by

foreign institutions were displayed. There, the visual works represented, as indicated by

the regrettable feelings of loss expressed by Xue Quanceng, the physical absence of those

artifacts from their place of origin.