Page 18 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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reference to the passage of time, they are find it important to attempt to overcome the
currently appraised as valuable collectibles, dichotomy between people and things. It
heirlooms and antiqueware. In addition to the remains vital to relate the life of things, in one
fact that they have now moved into these way or another, to the ways in which people give
categories, their subject matter has the potential meaning to them. 16 The observation that objects
to provide them with a new function as have social lives has become an important line of
exemplary educational objects. After all, they thought in material culture studies. Yet, if we are
represent European, North American, and to move forward in our understanding of the
Chinese (in fact, Asian) maritime and trading complex workings of material culture, we must
history. Rich stories emerge from them. There investigate the potentially diverse processes
are several aspects that also make the paintings whereby inanimate objects (such as Chinese 17
significant for contemporary viewers. They carry export paintings) come to be socially alive. A
all sorts of potential identities. The scenes multidisciplinary approach to this phenomenon
depicted were not only conceived in aesthetic is indispensable in terms of optimising a new
terms, or because of memory or the degree of image of and an advanced outlook on Chinese
saleability they also teach us about a far broader export painting. On the one hand, major art-
range of aspects. Indeed, we can learn about historical paradigms provide us with the lexicon
social world history from them, and about for iconographic matters, formal analysis and
globalisation and glocalisation, transport, aesthetics, as well as for meaning construction
architecture, international trade, former daily and agency production. On the other hand, the
life in the Pearl River delta and mutual current research methods operational in the
exchanges between Europe, North America, discourses of visual anthropology and sociology
China and other Asian countries in the late – used to analyse multilineal processes of
eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. commodification, value accruement or value
Moreover, cross-cultural ideas about beauty, dwindling, and those that recognise the
connections between trade and collecting, and importance of materiality – provide an adequate
this particular integrated, blended, transcultural set of tools for scrutinising these concepts.
painting phenomenon as a whole, are additional Finally, building on language systems from these
properties that constitute the potency of these two academic fields, combined with some key
paintings. We must take these capabilities into theoretical concerns of symmetrical archaeology
account when we evaluate them as a class in on integrated, mixed and entangled beings and
their own right. It is clear, given these objects, appears to be effective in a number of
characteristics, that the joint collections of ways. 17 It is only through the application of such
Chinese export paintings in the Netherlands a versatile approach that the scale and meaning
need exploration in greater detail. of this particular art practice will emerge.
In brief, from a multidisciplinary perspective, The nature and scope of the research corpus,
along the cross-cultural and transnational lines the disregard for a substantial percentage of
of production to consumption, through Chinese export paintings in Dutch public
exchange, circulation, ‘freezing’ and collections (more on this later), and today’s
revivification (or re-commodification), Made for global reassessment of this genre of painting
Trade endeavours to argue that Chinese export meant that I have always been convinced of the
paintings can be looked upon as active need for this research. These aspects, combined
participants in a network that connects material with the study of authoritative multidisciplinary
goods, human practices and current ideas and theories on the concepts mentioned, led to the
concepts. 15 This research investigates the agency pivotal questions, outlined below, that guide this
of these artworks. Like Wim van Binsbergen, I research.

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15 I came across the term ‘freezing’ in Van Binsbergen 2005, which gave me an essential insight into the Dutch
collections, many of which are currently ‘deep frozen’, or, in other words, ‘overlooked and neglected’, taken out
circulation. Some scholars (Gerritsen), however, believe that a work never can be ‘frozen’, because even when a
work of art is overlooked and neglected, it always shares a dynamic cultural context (email 13 July 2016). Happily,
many Dutch museums are actively digitising more and more of their objects, including their collections of Chinese
export paintings. Once they are accessible through the Internet, I would argue that they are no longer ‘frozen’.
16 Van Binsbergen 2005, 19.
17 Olsen 2012, 209. Symmetrical archaeology promotes mixtures and hybrids of humans and things. This line in
the archaeological field follows the idea that things (as Chinese export paintings must also be conceived), are
beings in the world alongside other beings, such as humans.