Page 167 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

64 pag:Opmaak 1
18-10-2016 15:46 Pagina 38
roos boek 129-192 d

comes to the fore. Like the variety of subject Scandinavian rock carving sites? 198 It is certainly
matter, there is also a variety of uses, with, again, possible that some of the painted subjects have
a variety of concerns. On the one hand, by potential symbolic significance, but not
providing evidence for aspects of social reality, necessarily. This approach, while being attentive
the testimony of the depicted images has enriched to and respecting the integrity and otherness of
our knowledge of the historical China trade, a Chinese export paintings, includes the right of
period lacking primary written sources. The these paintings “not to be meaningful in the
subject matter of the early paintings of daily life, dominant interpretive sense.” 199 In this sense,
i.e. ordinary people in their natural habitat, help we must not confuse meaning with symbolic or
us to construct a ‘history from below’. They metaphorical meaning, but rather allow the
166 purported, as Koon states when she writes about depicted scene or painting in question to be
the image of Canton that emphasised a hybrid valuable in and of itself. The potential to be
Guangdong cosmopolitanism, “in parallel with appraised as artworks with an interesting
travel stories and personal diaries, to be narrative to demonstrate must be taken into
eyewitness accounts of the city.” 197 On the other account. The worth of this shared cultural
hand, it is known that the depicted people, repertoire, then, can be accrued from the outset.
scenes, landscapes, harbours, and ships, are less To return to the question of whether Chinese
realistic and distort social reality, rather than export paintings can be considered as reliable
reflect it. However interesting an in-depth study eyewitnesses in terms of reconstructing the past,
into the processes that cause the ambiguous we must be aware that there will be always
nature of these genres, in Made for Trade I leave problems, as Burke recalls when he writes about
this for what it is, because my research using the evidence of images safely, in terms of
concentrates on the confluence of the different “context, function, rhetoric, recollection
use value aspects of these paintings as export (whether soon or long after the event),
commodities – as actants. And it focuses on how secondhand witnessing and so on.” 200 The same
these works accrued value or how this value ‘problems’ occur when using textual records for
dwindled over time, between their time and place this purpose. Here, it is adequate to understand
of production to today. The ambiguous character that these paintings were produced by someone
of Chinese export painting seems to have little of a specific class (professional (trade) painter), in
influence per se on the evaluation of this a particular situation and place (transcultural
phenomenon along the trajectory of their social encounters, different points of view, export
life. There were many other mechanisms specific goods on the market place,
responsible for this, as discussed in Chapter 2 commissioner-master-apprentice-relation, vibrant
and as will be shown in Chapter 5. harbour city as a melting pot with a strong local
We must ask ourselves, why are these genres and, at the same time, cosmopolitan identity),
painted – for what purpose, and what was the and at a particular moment in world history
intended use of a (set of) painting(s) or album? (globalisation, (trading) interest in ‘mysterious’
Were they meant to portray cultural disparities China, upcoming Western powers with
between East and West at that time? Or, did the megalomaniac ideas). For instance, in general, we
iconography of nineteenth-century China or that can say that the early paintings, depicting daily
of the Netherlands in this period influence the life, bird-and-flower paintings, costumes, arts
kinds of subjects that could be painted? Or were and crafts scenes (silk, porcelain and tea
there more opportunistic motives behind the production), and some maritime subjects, allude
choice for certain subjects, namely, the games of to being relatively reliable pictures with an
supply-and-demand and making money? Do the apparent truthfulness. 201 The very detailed
paintings serve as a window onto cultural or rendering of the subject matter is mostly
cognitive realms, as Olsen asks in relation to the trustworthy in relation to small elements, so that
interpretively legitimate role of North it can be understood in its original social

---
197 Koon 2014, 68.
198 Olsen 2012, 222.
199 Ibid., 223.
200 Burke 2001, 15.
201 The concepts ‘truth’ and ‘visual verisimilitude’ were absent from Chinese art criticism until the beginning of
the twentieth century. Gu Yi states in her article on photography and the reinvention of visual truth in China, that
the legitimacy of verisimilitude (realism, naturalism, or lifelikeness) since the 1910s suddenly became a crucial
concept in the discussion of all visual production. Gu 2013, 120-121.