Page 36 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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Chapter 2), Deborah Poole gives us a tool to see
how the system of production and consumption
was strongly coordinated and organised, and
how different values are accrued by the same
kinds of paintings. 62 Then, with a strong focus
on the consumer-end of this market, it is
important to be aware of the fact that once an
object lost its contextual mooring, it often
functioned as an open invitation to an
abstraction and misrepresentation of its situated
meaning. 63 Along the way, Chinese export 35
paintings, which constructed specific views of
China, were moved from one cultural value
system to another. Moreover, there are many
mechanisms by which values are assigned to
them and which determine distinct moments in
a painting’s social life – that is, the journey of
a commodity from its traditional value sphere
with an immediate personal emotional value
when consumed by its first owner to an objet
d’art when studied by me in the storeroom a
Dutch museum.
The next chapter will outline the theoretical
framing in order to study the extensive and
valuable collections present in Dutch museums.

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62 Poole 1997.
63 Henriot & Yeh 2013, xvi.