Page 195 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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roos boek 193-288 d

educational objects that can teach us about the
broad range of China trade aspects, including,
amongst others: the social world history in that
period; globalisation and glocalisation; inter-
national trade with mutual exchanges between
Western countries and China; cross-cultural
ideas about artistic (painting) conventions in
China and ‘the West.’
Finally, I conclude that value always exists in
the eyes of someone else. Clyde Kluckhohn, an
194 anthropologist who spent a large part of his life
defining the terms of analysis of value, and who
is cited in Graebers book, produced the central
assumption that values are “conceptions of the
desirable” – conceptions that play some sort of
role in influencing the choices people make
between different possible courses of action. 95
Here, ‘desirable’ refers to the idea about what
people ought to want. Values, then, are ideas
that have direct effects on people’s behaviour.
For the present purpose, there is some worth in
mapping the series of values of something in the
traditional sociological sense: power, prestige,
moral purity, etc., and also in defining them as
being, on some level, fundamentally similar to
economic ones. Yet, the way in which Western
buyers, I assume, incorporated Chinese export
paintings into their self-presentation reveals
much about how they defined these artworks as
a prestige good. 96 The narratives of this pictorial
art produced for export purposes tell something
about the interests and evaluation of the works
by Westerners in ‘the East.’ The importance of
Chinese export paintings merges in action
towards it.
The sketches of the biographical fragments
of the paintings and their owners show that the
value of these paintings lies in their movement
and connected interpretations. A biographical
approach also demonstrates that when not
evaluated as meaningful, valuable objects, they
stay tucked away in the museum storeroom.
After all, they are excellent examples of
artworks that let the Chinese makers of them
speak and that have the ability to let viewers
of today go back to the historical times of the
Dutch China trade. Moreover, they allow us to
relate that history to present-day trade practices
between the Netherlands and China.

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95 Graeber 2001, 2-5.
96 Unfortunately, I do not know of any photographs showing Chinese export paintings in the interiors of
Westerners who live in Chinese port cities or in Batavia, and who almost certainly possessed this kind of art.