To the Asian Grocery Store!
I started this journey trying to make sense of why the porcelain artworks I saw were served less on a silver platter and more half-baked. I noticed that ‘aisles’ in museums are part of the reason. These aisles, these museum categories, create a distinction between Asian Art and Decorative Arts. But craft and export objects are meant to live in between. So how did these aisles come about? Since the golden age of East Asian art collecting in the nineteenth century, artworks have made their way into American and European museums. They were difficult to categorize, so a new set of verbal and visual language was invented to sort and appreciate them in their new homes. But, this language fails to describe their whole state of being and leaves blank canvases in its wake. Hence why, I set out to find new ways to look at and describe these artworks.
Chapter 1 - Language
It starts with the language we have now.
Decorative . Arts
(plural noun)
“Implies a wide range of objects/mediums/makers/origins”
The Dictionary of Decorative Arts, published in 1977 by John Fleming and Hugh Honour, was the first to define the term officially. Their definition included furniture and furnishings pieces covering “medieval to present day” from Europe and North America. Additionally, they “have gone beyond these limits of place and time only in order to include accounts of craftsmen and types of objects that have played a part in the West, e.g. Chinese and Japanese ceramics.” Fleming and Honour described a wide range of materials and placed heavy emphasis on formal technicalities, offering advice on their replication. They only describe context to the extent of how the fashion was adopted to Western tastes.
Asian . Art
(singular noun)
“Implies a singular artist/school/medium/origin”
The term Asian Art’s meaning and authority were gradually established with a wave of research to help American audiences cultivate an appreciation for Asian Art. For instance, Charles Freer (prominent Asian art collector) and Ernest Fenollosa (headed Asian objects curator at Boston’s MFA 1890-1895) “helped develop an apparatus of scholarship for Asian objects, frameworks like stylistic schools, and chronological progression”, creating a digestible canon of art history. Their priorities were understanding prints and paintings, which made porcelain and other crafts secondary despite their vast quantity in museums.
Since the seventeenth century, Europe developed an obsession with collecting porcelain and imported it in bulk for tea and tableware. This ‘porcelain mania’ led aristocratic palaces and European country houses to have Porzellanzimmer (porcelain chambers), where blue-and-white pieces, often referred to as ‘white gold’, were displayed as status symbols. The rarity of these porcelains was heightened by China’s Haijin (海禁), isolationist policies that restricted trade to only a few ports. It didn’t just stop there. By the eighteenth, the European fascination with porcelain evolved into the chinoiserie, an aesthetic movement dedicated to imitating Chinese furnishings. Nevertheless, despite its prestige in the European imagination, porcelain’s status as art has faced a twofold marginalization. In Western art hierarchies, painting and printmaking were prioritized over the decorative arts. While in China, class stratification enforced the literati’s preference for calligraphy and ink painting, viewing ceramics as lesser artistic expressions.
The aisles have existed long before museums, resulting in the language we inherented today. The same porcelain vase could be positioned to evoke two differing reads by the Decorative Arts and Asian Art aisles—either as an object or as an artwork. The Decorative Arts aisle is better suited to describing and conserving its material, while the Asian Art aisle is more relevant to its cultural context. In other words, should noodles be with other carbs like pasta or should they be in the Asian food aisle? You could say that the works should be placed together with their culture of origin, where it’s understood with other objects it’s related to. Or, that the objects were commissioned and never intended to be used in Asia, so they’re displayed as they were historically in European homes.
The need for museum objects to be either/or is produced by language surrounding the object; porcelain happens to be one such object/artwork hanging in-between. Language prescribes understanding, defines the aisles, and provides the recipe for seeing. In many ways, language supersedes sight and predetermines what we see.
Chapter 2 - Sight
Another kind of language at the grocery store is visual, a key tool to distinguish between the aisle of anthropology and the aisle of art. Upon stumbling on these aisles in my research, I realized I knew about these two aisles from a familiar sight in my home museum. In a darkened, aged room, two shelves below eye level, crammed behind glass, you'll find a collection of Ming and Qing porcelain. On the floor below, there are many well-lit pedestals topped by marble sculptures.
In the nineteenth-century museum field, there was debate about whether Asian objects belonged in anthropology or art museums. The heart of the question lies in: Can they produce art? At the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, Japanese objects were finally exhibited in the Palace of Fine Arts and made an impression on the world’s stage. ‘Yes’, they chimed. ‘Yes, they can’. Such beautiful objects must be art, and a nation’s history and accomplishments are on display. However, Chinese objects never made it into the palace.
Museums today inherit the logic from these World Expositions. Porcelain artworks are described by storytelling format of distant timelines and lists, not a chapter of exciting heroes, artists and characters with agency. The focus was not to document individual narratives of makers, ideas, and social conditions, but rather, to come to a collective conclusion. Remnants of the anthropology lens are still present in how many Chinese objects are displayed.
Though, there are always exceptions. As I explored more museums in the States, I found the experience of looking at porcelain pieces equal parts entertaining and confusing, frustrating and inspiring.
(A collection of various photos of porcelain objects of Chinese origin displayed and gilded in recreated American domestic spaces. These photographs were taken at the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the RISD Museum.)
Why does that vase have a mermaid handle? Let’s rewind. Mounted porcelain has been a part of European decorative traditions since medieval times. Parisian gilt-bronze mounts both familiarized and embellished the exotic, peaking in popularity during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Marchands-merciers, the interior designers of their time, commissioned these mounts from various craft guilds. By the late 18th century, French interiors embraced a revival of classical forms, including Greco-style pediments—triangular gables atop pillars—where Chinese porcelain was treated like Greek urns. This trend of gilt-mounted porcelain and classical ornamentation spread to Britain and later shaped the mix-and-match pastiche aesthetic found in many American museums today.
However extravagant and telling of the Western-gaze, these installations suggest that the artisans and collectors are unknowingly reconstructing the objects’ narratives through innovative displays. It’s an antithesis to how the sterile, institutional gaze of the anthropology aisle. And perhaps, the jarring contrast of over-the-top embellishments creates a moment of unintentional critique against institutional methods through a gilded personal touch. Where absence becomes a blemish, the intrinsic human need for narrative prompts us to fill in the gaps.
So I wondered: what is the equivalent of gilding? The stories French decorators told, though not true, added intrigue. As I thought about the kinds of fabricated narratives I wanted to create, I started writing a recipe to figuratively, take artwork off the shelf.
Chapter 3 - Recipes
Chapter 4 - New Ways of Seeing
What prompts you to check out something new at the grocery store? For me, it’s when I come across a new recipe. If I see a new use or possibility for an ingredient, I’m more enticed to look into it. During my time as a Mellon intern, I worked on a Ways of Seeing tour for contemporary art galleries with similar themes of what it means to see and describe in inventive ways. Hopefully, the aisles themselves will soon expand to cater to how we want to see in museums. In the meantime, enjoy the recipe and cook up a storm!