This morning to the Chinoiserie exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). An opportunity to compare, side by side, Asian originals with Western versions of them. A lovely couple of hours.
It was irritating to read the commentary. Westerners (a) mostly got the East wrong (b) if they got it right, always stripped away all original meaning from the objects. There was a lovely figure of Guang Yin, for example (rather like the one above) a precise copy, according to the catalogue . But the spiritual meaning was absent, said the catalogue: the porcelain figure was merely “a decorative object”. This claim was repeated three more times about different items.
Unpacked, the writer means that no-one in the West who looked at such figures knew about or responded to their spiritual significance. That’s one fine-grained retrospectoscope.
Nothing much at all about how chinoiserie adds something different – gets a new thing right – and of course nothing about the compliment of wanting to copy such figures. Edward Said said (in 1978!) that ‘the West’ always and everywhere got ‘the East’ wrong so no exceptions will be allowed. Since then, Said’s claims have been extensively criticised by other scholars, but the NGV leaves that out. As it leaves out the converse – how ‘the East’ got ‘the West’ wrong.
But there you are, the things are there to be seen, and if you live in Melbourne, you should see them.
Chinoiserie is often characterised as ‘merely’ decorative, but, like you, I think that is too simplistic. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century China was seen in the west as an exemplary society. It was admired for its well regulated government and philosphers like Leibniz urged Europeans to learn from China. As a consequence, chinoiserie imagery was occasionally used as a political symbol, denoting ‘rational government’ or ‘virtuous morals’. It was only later that China came to be seen as a quaint country where history stood still and chinoiserie became correspondingly more escapist.