Page 51 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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society, while other forms continue to be case of Chinese export paintings, the meaning
identified as mixed and integrated objects, not of the term hybridity has nothing to do with
belonging to prevailing canonical ideas and developing new cultural paradigms or identities
conventions. Chinese export paintings exemplify in the manner of Homi K. Bhabha; rather, it has
this latter identification, which made them everything to do with processes of exchange,
second-rate for a long time. But I concur with appropriation and the combination of taste and
Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, American visual conventions. 48 Notwithstanding the way
specialists in the fields of art history, in which this integrated painting style was seen,
anthropology and colonial visual culture, that it received and assigned value in the West at the
is “we who recognise, name and remark on time of its production and today (i.e. as a mix
50 hybridity.” 47 In a (post)colonial context, between Chinese and Western painting
hybridity connotes specific new by-products of conventions), this study posits that these
Western expansion and a polarising construction paintings possess equivalent signs of the
of ‘we’ and ‘they’. In this oppositional sense, inherently collective and blended culture of the
when marking cultural differences, grown out of place of their production. By using the term
intolerance or out of the need to distinguish hybrid in this complimentary way, it includes the
between things belonging to the ‘own’ society idea that a Chinese export painting bears strong
and things that do not – often with an implicit traces of its maker’s handwriting, rather than
(de)valuation of the latter – the use of the term being a mere copy of a Western model.
‘hybridity’ is problematic. Moreover, it is this interpreted Chineseness that
When in Made for Trade, however, the term makes this art genre interesting and valuable to
‘hybrid’ is used, it is always done in a positive modern eyes and hybrid audiences around the
way and stays away from the inherent value world.
judgement that this term implicitely carries in its For a long time, it was believed that a Chinese
meaning. ‘Hybrid’ in Made for Trade means export painting’s use value or utility resided in
‘blended’, to describe this painting phenomenon its ability to represent or reproduce an image
as a ‘product’ of confluences of ideas. This term of an original or a reality. 49 But, rather than
also incorporates various cultural conventions represent a cultural reality of the hardships of
for Chinese export paintings, as it makes this a residency in ‘the East’ – a difficult sea voyage,
painting genre understandable. Furthermore, a stay in a messy Cantonese apartment, chaotic
‘hybrid’ suggests a genre that is not confined by and crowded streets, noise, the inaccessibility of
‘pure’ Western stylistic elements, or by ‘pure’ the city – these paintings of caricatured visions
traditional (literati) Chinese painting laws (the of China fed the Dutch ‘traders gaze’ and the
purity of which do not exist in empirical reality). one of their beloved back home, with an exotic
When the hybrid character of these artworks is and romantic stereotypical image. This quite
referred to throughout this dissertation, this fixed and clear-cut view of China, represented in
signifies that Chinese painters adopted dominant the content of these paintings, kept their
Western painting conventions only selectively to fantasies about China afloat. In addition to
make their work more succesfull for trade to being a representation of a cultural reality, they
Western buyers. Rather, it is a reference to this appear to form a selective reality, separate and
painting genre’s hybridity in subject matter, in distinct from the subjects they portray. In the
applied techniques, in used media, in material historical China trade period, this construction
forms, and also in the characteristic market of visual culture – that is, a common business
place with its specific production methods and tourist visual culture – included an array of
its particular kind of consumers. The confluence agents who, we can assume, might have guided
of hybridity present in all these aspects makes the gaze. By painting only specific subjects in
the Dutch corpus and other collections of their characteristic way, the painters themselves
Chinese export paintings a truly shared cultural were important agents who guided the ‘trader’s
repertoire. And certainly, this conflux of shared gaze’. In addition, both on board ship and on
cultural signs adds to the genre’s use value. the home front, fellow-seamen and wives were
Concurring with Maria Mok, I argue that, in the influential agents in the purchase. The high

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47 Ibid.
48 Mok 2014, 37. Bhabha 1994.
49 Noteworthy here is that after photography came on the scene in China in the mid-nineteenth century, the
phenomenon of Chinese export painting slowly disappeared and painters’ studios transformed into photography
studios.