Intellectual Context
Soon after the publication of The Travels of Marco Polo in the fifteenth century, Europeans developed a curiosity about China that was a product of, but went well beyond, the closely related imperatives of conversion and colonization. This curiosity was reciprocated when, by the end of the sixteenth century, European Jesuit missionaries came to China and shared, beyond religion, their knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, cartography, and art with members of the Chinese educated upper class (Reed and Demattè 2007). Thus, in the West as well as in China, began a process of imagining the other that lead to Chinoiserie in Europe and to a parallel phenomenon in China that George Norbert Kates has referred to as Européenerie (Kates 1952, 198).
The Western image of China was formed, on the one hand, by representations of its landscape and people produced by European travelers (e.g., Kwok and Thomas 2009); on the other, by the pictures on objects of decorative art that, from the sixteenth century onwards, were exported to Europe and later also to America. The Chinese image of the West was shaped primarily through books and engravings that came to China with missionaries and, subsequently, with traders in luxury goods. The latter brought European prints as models for Chinese craftsmen to follow, especially for the export wares called Chine de commande (Lunsingh Scheurleer 1974).
From the point of view of art, until the end of the nineteenth century, most Western artists (except those who traveled to China) knew little about Chinese “high” art, specifically literati painting, which generally was held in low esteem by European travelers and, hence, not exported to the West. Nor did they know much about Chinese court painting or, before the introduction of travel photography, about Chinese (Buddhist) sculpture. They did have some superficial knowledge about Chinese architecture and garden design, primarily through images and descriptions in travel books. For most of the Qing dynasty, however, Western familiarity with Chinese art was largely confined to the decorative arts, esp. textiles, porcelains, lacquers and enamels.
Chinese artists had more in-depth knowledge of Western “high” art. Reproductive engravings of European paintings were sent to China to be reproduced on porcelain plaques and plates (see above). Additionally, there was a small but influential presence of Western artists in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jesuit painters like Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name: Lang Shining; 1688-1766), Jean-Denis Attiret (Chinese name: Wang Zhi Cheng; 1702-1768), Ignaz Sichelbarth (Chinese name: Ai Qimeng; 1708-1780) and Michel Benoist (Chinese name Jiang Youren; 1715-1774) worked at the Emperor’s court in the eighteenth century. Some decades later, lay artists like William Daniell (1769-1837), George Chinnery (1774-1852), Auguste Borget (1808-1877), and Marciano António Baptista (1826-1896) sought out China to produce paintings with a new range of topographic and ethnographic subject matter that were successfully marketed in nineteenth-century Europe and America, but were also well-known in China.
Though a good deal of scholarly research has been done on the artistic encounters between China and the West, it has been largely one-directional. Western scholars, for the most part, have worked on the topic of Chinoiserie, the adaptation of Chinese themes and forms to Western fine and, especially, decorative arts, architecture, and gardens. Indeed, literature on the topic is extensive, including books, exhibition catalogs, and articles (for a bibliography of recent works, see appendix 1). Chinese scholars, conversely, have worked on the topic of Western influences in Chinese art, focusing on the introduction of perspective into Chinese painting; on the work of Jesuit artists working in Chinese style, such as Castiglione and Attiret; and, to a lesser extent, on the work of Chinese “export” artists, working in western or hybrid styles, such as Guan Zuolin (“Spoilum,”1770-1805) and his sons (or grandsons?), Guan Qiaochang (“Lam Qua,” 1801-1860) and Guan Lianchang (Ting Qua, 1809-c. 1870). In addition, some have looked at Western elements in Qing dynasty architecture as well as gardens. Strikingly, there has been little contact between these two groups of scholars and each group has focused almost exclusively on the flow of artistic ideas and motifs in one direction (East to West or West to East). This has been a shortcoming for two reasons:
First, it has led to an undervaluation of the mutuality of the exchange. Indeed, it is obvious but often overlooked that both Chinoiserie and Européenerie were the product of the same historical circumstances and took place within the same context of diplomatic and economic relations (North 2010). For instance, the Dutch ships that brought stacks of European prints to China to be copied on Western-styled soup tureens and candleholders, returned with Chinese-style blue-and-white porcelain for which there was a huge market in Holland and in Europe generally. One of the few scholars to have emphasized the reciprocity of the exchange is Michael Sullivan, who in his well-known The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, first published in 1972, makes a heroic attempt at establishing the grand narrative of the artistic encounter of East and West, approaching it from both sides simultaneously. Sullivan’s endeavor, admirable as it is, suffers from its explicitly modernist approach, which leads him to create, particularly for the Western engagement with Far-Eastern art, a progressive narrative that moves from mutual misunderstanding to eventual appreciation, even fusion. Indeed, Sullivan describes this engagement as something of a love affair that begins, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, with what he calls, a “flirtation with the Orient” (Chinoiserie), then moves to a “real understanding” of Far-Eastern art at the end of the nineteenth century (Japonisme), to climax in the “instinctive grasp” of the principles of Chinese and Japanese art by the Abstract Expressionists in the twentieth century (cf. Chu 2011). Today such a “grand narrative” seems less convincing and, perhaps also, less desirable than it may have appeared in the 1970s. As a consequence, current scholarship has largely moved away from the “big picture” to focus on specific encounters in an attempt to understand how each of these was framed by unique historic, geographic, and economic circumstances and closely linked to issues of market and patronage
Secondly, the lack of contact between Chinese and Western scholar working on cross-cultural artistic exchange also has had an adverse impact on individual research as few if any scholars have sufficient grounding in both Chinese and Western culture to analyze, in detail, the hybrid products of this exchange. Even to analyze a simple Delft Chinoiserie plate, for example, one would have to know something about the Chinese wares that were exported to Holland (were those wares sold in China or made for export only?); one would have to understand the different technical processes that were used in China and the West (true porcelain vs. imitations thereof); one would have to be cognizant of the various Chinese decorative motifs (clouds, bats, chrysanthemums, etc.) that the Dutch were imitating (how were these motifs understood by the craftsmen who painted these plates and the middle class customers who bought them?); one would need to know something about the monetary and artist value of the plate (was it seen as a cheap knock-off of a Chinese plate?) as well as about the way it was displayed (were authentic Chinese plates and Delft imitations displayed together?).
In view of the above, a dialogue between Chinese, European, and American scholars on the issues of cultural encounter and accommodation and their consequences for artistic production would greatly benefit scholarship in China and the West and would underscore the importance of connecting art histories as a critical driver of cross-cultural research. Such a dialogue would also be inspiring because it would bring together various scholarly and intellectual approaches as well as different methodologies with which to examine these questions. In the August 2011 planning meeting for the proposed symposium it became clear that the methodological approaches to the hybrid artistic products of the encounters between China and Europe are different in East and West. Indeed, we were surprised to find that even the way these objects are valued is different. For instance, while in China the Chinese-style work of Giuseppe Castiglione (Lan Shining) is much admired and has been widely studied (e.g., Nie 2006; Wang 2007; Zhu/Wang 2007), relatively little work has been done on Chinoiserie. Conversely, despite the recent work of Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens (2007), Castiglione is still little known and valued in the West. (It is telling, in this context, that while reproductions of Castiglione’s famous One Hundred Horses Scroll may be found in Chinese restaurants around the globe, the ink study for this scroll, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is not normally on view.) While the unequal value placed on these two aspects of Chinese influence on Western art may be related to the fact that most of Lang Shining’s works are physically in China while few objects of Chinoiserie are available there, there are other reasons for this different valuation as well. An important one is, no doubt, that Lang Shining engaged with Chinese court art rather than with the export products of Chinese kilns or lacquer workshops or the images in Western travel books that inspired a European-based artists like François Boucher.
Dialogue about the valuation of different forms of hybridity, as well as about ways to analyze and understand artistic “hybridity,” will, we expect, lead to a more profound understanding of cross-cultural artistic exchange in general, and of the artistic encounter between China and the West in particular. This, at least, is the goal of “Qing Encounters.” Informed by different viewpoints and methodologies brought to bear on the encounter between China and the West by an international group of scholars from China, Europe, and the US, the symposium will, we hope, become a model for cross-cultural research.