Page 14 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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Introduction

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Chinese export paintings (yáng wài huà or wài that this confluence of values makes Chinese
xiāo huà) were largely intended for trade and export painting distinctive as an art
export. Far from being just commercial paintings phenomenon that needs to be treated as a class
produced by profit-making Chinese artists in the in its own right. I argue that the output of this
Pearl River delta, they operate in a highly class, in terms of the Dutch collections, is a
efficient market system of global dimensions and shared cultural repertoire of worthwhile
are loaded with all kinds of cultural products that are of research value and which
connotations. As transcultural and partly deserve to be made accessible and, without
translatable objects, as will be elaborated later, question, must be safeguarded for future
they conveyed the richness of a culture and, as generations.
such, they operated as valuable vehicles in the
construction of reality in the period considered Terminology
1
by this research and long after. To understand It is believed that the term ‘Chinese export
the process in which meaning is created, I follow painting’ was coined by Western art historians,
Bjørnar Olsen, who claims that we must following the precedent set by the term ‘Chinese
recognise the importance of materiality (form, export porcelain’, in order to distinguish this
content, subject) and the inextricable type of painting (yáng wài huà or wài xiāo huà)
entanglement of the human condition with from literati (traditional) Chinese (national)
2
objects and other non-human entities. Likewise, painting (wén rén huà or guó huà). It also
we must realise that the representative and social references the fact that these works were made
3
function (use and trajectory) of these specific for export to the West. This term only came
artworks, with their cohesive commodity/export into use after 1950. In that year, Jourdain and
value, historic value, artistic value and material Jenyns introduced the term ‘export painting’ in
value, might be thought of as their use value, if their early survey of Chinese export art in the
4
not, as their most substantial feature. The aim of eighteenth century. These artworks are also
this dissertation is to make convincingly clear called ‘China trade painting’ or ‘historical
---
1 The timeframe that forms the focus of the research on which this dissertation is based is patterned around the
beginning (1736-1790s), the heyday (1800-1850s), the decay (late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century)
and revivification (early twenty-first century) of Chinese export paintings.
2 Olsen 2012, 211. Bjørnar Olsen is Professor at the Norwegian University of Tromsø. He is a specialist in
archaeological theory, material culture and museology. He is a prominent figure in field of the ontology of objects,
including symmetrical archaeology. This facet of the archaeological field avoids modernist dichotomies, such as
subject-object, structure-agency, nature-culture and individual-society, leaving no room for composite beings
already mixed and entangled. This research field gathers “approaches that share the conviction that the world is far
better represented and understood if conceived of in terms of mixtures and entanglements rather than dualisms
and oppositions. It poses a radical levelling of the way we treat humans and things, both in our articulations of the
material past and in our reflexive analyses of our own archaeological practices.”
(http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/symmetry/816).
3 This research uses labels such as ‘the West’, ‘Westerners’ and ‘Western’, referring to a specific geographic and
cultural domain. These labels are controversial, as using them as descriptors for European and North American
regions neglects the multiple perspectives and nuanced differences within the specific cultural groups and classes
in these areas. However, they are terms of convenience – a simplification for the sake of brevity – rather than being
useful anthropological or art-sociological terms.
4 Jourdain & Jenyns 1950; Wilson & Liu 2003, 10; Dikötter 2006, 26, 39.