Page 88 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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There are a number of other causes of the lack the Netherlands. Returning with their families
of transparency in relation to the economic and their possessions, these people (sometimes
aspects of the Chinese export painting market. ex-colonials from the East-Indies) donated or
Firstly, transactions were frequently negotiated sold a great deal of their possessions and
verbally, rather than being recorded in writing. Chinese export paintings as part of the furniture.
Secondly, just like the art trade everywhere else Furthermore, there was a movement in the
in the world, there were trade secrets, which Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s against
resulted in a broad spectrum of transactions having lived ‘in the East,’ which had colonial
remaining shadowy. The sellers – at that time, connotations. Consequently, in these years much
the painters – like the art dealers today and the of this sort of artwork on the Dutch market
buyers over time did and do not speak readily of came via auction houses and/or via donations to 87
their commercial success or disclose the sources museums. 121
of their paintings or their network of clients. A
third reason for the lack of transparency is the Techniques and methods
fact that when the ‘value’ of this art genre is Although it is exceedingly difficult to trace the
addressed, it is frequently in relation to the exact avenues through which the Western-style
artistic, historic and emotional value, rather than painting conventions were transmitted to and
monetary value. appropriated by Cantonese painters, it is known
It is certainly not the case that most Chinese that these techniques (oil painting, linear
export paintings that came to the Netherlands perspective drawing, shade-working) were often
initially ended up in museums. More often, they passed on by the painters ‘on the spot’. 122 As the
became part of private interiors, or entered the trades in Chinese export goods, as historian
circuits of collectors and dealers. Until today Joseph Ting states, were usually family run, it
they have been moving across national borders, was common practice for Chinese artists to carry
up and down the social ladder. From the homes on their family trade or skill for generations. 123
of China traders, missionaries, planters and With this (local) knowledge, the painting
officials in Indonesia, they followed the same workshops embarked on mass production of
routes, as Raymond Corbey writes in his work ‘local subjects’ in both Chinese and European
on tribal art traffic, “through flea markets, local style for a predominantly foreign audience. 124
auctions, and antique shops, and wound up in In Ten Thousands Things, Lothar Ledderose
the networks of specialized dealers, at least if explains that production in modules is well-
they did not get dumped with the rubbish when known in Chinese society. The use of this system
their owners passed away.” 120 At the beginning exists in language, literature, architecture,
of the 1960s, the decolonisation of Indonesia philosophy and social organisations as well as in
brought with it a stream of people and objects to the visual arts. 125 Also among literati painters

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120 Corbey 2000, 45.
121 Personal conversation with Mrs Reinders Folmer, November 2014. This also can be seen in annual records of
Dutch ethnological and maritime museums. In this period, many people (though not the parents of Mrs Reinders
Folmer) were embarrassed about the fact that they had lived in Indonesia. At the time, there was a huge
counterflow: ‘we don’t want anything to do with this’. By contrast, it was fashionable to, for example, support Cuba.
122 Clunas 1997, 197-199. Fa-ti Fan 2004, 47-49.
123 Ting 1982, 9. Guangzhou-born Joseph Ting studied Chinese literature and history at the Hong Kong University.
He joined the Hong Kong Museum of Art as an Assistant Curator in 1979 and was appointed Chief Curator of the
Hong Kong Museum of History in 1995. He retired in 2007 after serving for 28 years, during which he was
instrumental in the planning and implementation of the new Hong Kong Museum of History, the Hong Kong
Museum of Coastal Defence and the Dr Sun Yat-sen Museum.
124 Appadurai 1996, 178-199. In his chapter 9, Appadurai addresses “related questions that have arisen in an ongoing
series of writings about global cultural flows.” In this dissertation, the terms ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local subjects’
do not mean the production of locality in the context of the recognition of local indigenous representations by
groups of people of the same cultural background who live in a deterritorialized world, diasporic, and
transnational. Rather, it refers to the specific technical processes and their tangible results.
125 Ledderose 2000, 2. Lothar Ledderose holds the chair of East Asian Art at Heidelberg University. He is an
internationally renowned scholar of Chinese art and calligraphy. In his A.W. Mellon Lectures (1998), published in
Ten Thousand Things, he investigated module systems in the production of, amongst other art forms, Chinese
painting.