Page 62 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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assume that for the Chinese painters involved, These paintings are ever changing products,
the sign and signified were more in line with created in a continually interactive relation to
each other, namely as a piece of art or as a other visual material, people, ideas and
commodity through which they could knowledge (techniques). Secondly, we can say
demonstrate their painting skills and earn that Western customers and Western-style
money. There is simply no way of trying to painting with all its specifications, transformed
reconcile multiple locations when the people the visual language of the prevailing (literati)
involved speak different languages and if I, as Chinese painting practice into the new
the researcher, stand at another historical ‘language’ of a distinguishing Chinese art genre.
vantage point, since discourses change over time. However, this transformation never led to
It is far more interesting to explore interactions assimilation of the existing practice. On the 61
than the evaluation of similarities and contrary, the particularity of Chinese painting
differences. Or, as Lydia Liu puts it, “elevating culture has never been dissolved. The
connections over contrasts.” 106 We must conversion, so to speak, led to the genesis of a
consider cross-national comparison as a subject unique painting style that, because of the choice
rather than a method. of subject matter, functioned partly as a valuable
When we follow Bhabha’s theory on cultural translation of Chinese culture. It is too great a
translation, in which ‘natives’ become new leap to assert that these paintings are
migrants, translate their own culture into that of translations, or vehicles, of Chinese culture – we
the new host community and become interveners know, after all, that it largely concerns idealised
in the hegemonic cultures that they find representations – but there are many
themselves confronted with, the translation is ‘particularities’ of Chinese culture condensed
entirely foreignising. 107 In the translation, then, into a broad range of subjects.
the ‘foreignness’ of a word foregrounds or stages It seems that this kind of painting is actually
the cultural difference. To some extent, we can untranslatable when it comes to ‘cultural
treat Chinese export painters and, vice versa, translation’. Again, I borrow an idea from
foreign merchants, as ‘natives’. But, operating in Young, influenced by Walter Benjamin, to
transitional spaces, as mediators involved in explain this point, by arguing that the so-called
agential processes of intervention and target culture (the West) “is required to translate
interaction, within the dynamics of divergent itself into the ‘foreign’ idiom of the source
painting conventions, their mutual translation (China) in order to effect understanding.” 109
efforts resulted in an entwined artistic style with The hybrid painting style, full of non-Chinese
paintings having their inherent features. The but not entirely Western elements, contains
problem then, or rather the pitfall, with untranslatable aspects that do not flawlessly
translating Chinese export paintings, from the correspond to painting conventions on the part
time of their production to today, is that we of Western consumers. This has not proved,
must use our own language to explain the spirit however, to be an insurmountable problem.
of these works, without knowing what the In contrast, Chinese export painters with their
makers thought about their products and what excellent feel for their client’s penchant for
their intentions were. Another difficulty is Chinese art had the right qualities to create
translating paintings that are produced in a a new, attractive art form that integrated the
visual language that is already multiple within a ‘foreign’. Whether or not it is 100% ‘translatable’
transitional space, like the export art practice in to either side, did not matter. The hybrid appeal
the harbour cities in the Pearl River delta that of these paintings as results of shared cultural
originated within a mixed culture that was enterprises highly intrigued Western audiences
neither discrete, nor bound. To follow this latter and, at the same time, did the Chinese painters
perspective for my research, and I agree with no harm, as we now know. This style might
Young on this point, requires two ways of even be called a marketing strategy in modern
thinking. 108 Firstly, the ‘language’ of Chinese terminology and is the outcome of deliberate
export paintings seen and understood through decisions to please the buyers, as Mok
times and spaces, must be considered as “fluid, convincingly states, after judging many written
moving, mixed and without fixed boundaries.” comments by contented customers, who gave

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106 Liu, quoted in Seigel 2005, 66.
107 Bhabha 1994, 227.
108 Young 2012, 169-170.
109 Ibid., 171.