{"id":82893,"date":"2012-02-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/exhibition-note-7280\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:51:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:51:34","slug":"exhibition-note-7280","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/exhibition-note-7280\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition note"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/font>i Weiwei: Dropping the Urn\u201d at the Victoria and Albert Museum and \u201cThe Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery\u201d at Asia House offer, in quite, different ways, interesting insights into the interplay between Chinese and Western Art.<\/p>\n

At the center of the exhibition \u201cDropping the Urn,\u201d<\/span> <\/i>is a triple-framed photo of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei first holding, then dropping, then standing by the shattered shards of a Han Dynasty (266 B.C.\u2013A.D. 220) urn. A valuable historic artifact has become a disposable item in an enactment of modern performance art. The curators of the V&A have thoughtfully placed close at hand a similar, but intact, Eastern Han earthenware jar with a brown lead glaze. The curators have done the same with Ai\u2019s Coca-Cola Vase <\/i>(<\/span>1997), made by painting a Coca-Cola logo in bright red with gold underlining on a Neolithic vase. Next to it stands a similar but unimproved earth-colored vase with black decoration; both date from 5000\u20133000 B.C.. The branded version has by far the higher value in the marketplace and is also the more attractive of the two. Possibly this is an illusion created by its having suffered a \u201csea change into something rich and strange.\u201d Yet the original vase is still there underneath, and it is questionable whether it was of much interest to anyone other than dusty archaeologists who measure out their lives with ancient pots.<\/p>\n

Ai Weiwei would have been pleased with the juxtaposition: he both takes a pride in China\u2019s artistic past, within which ceramics are central, yet he maintains, \u201cI hate ceramics.\u201d He sees himself as creator, preserver, and destroyer. His zeal for preservation is shown in Souvenir from Beijing<\/i> (2002), a wooden box containing a brick rescued from the state-sanctioned destruction of one of Beijing\u2019s attractive traditional courtyards to make way for some vulgar new development. The brick is his protest. Those Americans and British who regularly connive at similar acts of vandalism are not really in any position to criticize the great Chinese pot-smasher. Yet there remains something shocking and pointless about Ai\u2019s Dust to Dust<\/i> (2009), a glass jar containing the remains of a Neolithic pottery vessel ground into dust, and thus returned to its original state, with all human fashioning removed. It is no doubt a metaphor for the inevitability of death\u2014indeed the one used in our burial service\u2014but it is also a worrying reminder of the deliberate destruction of the tablets of the ancestors during the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the V&A\u2019s labyrinth of corridors and elevators is a display relating to the Porcelain City, Jingdezhen<\/span>, <\/i>the city that inspired Ai and is the source of his notorious piles of porcelain sunflower seeds. For centuries this city was the most important place in the world for porcelain based on its local kaolin. In the display are works by four ceramicists who have stayed there and been inspired by its traditions: Ah Hian, a Chinese emigr\u00e9; Felicity Aylieff from England; Roger Law, an Australian; and Takeshi Yasuda from Japan, who, after a long stay in the United Kingdom, has become director of the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen. Aylieff, Law, and Yasuda have all provided examples of their own recent work in the Chinese tradition, but their ceramics differ greatly and in each case have been shaped by the national origin of their creator. Law\u2019s works are exuberantly covered in Australian sea creatures. Big fish boldly project from his Saltwater Pot <\/i>(<\/span>2003) which is sea-green with a brown tinge. Inside it is a very plain white with a tiny, almost invisible butterfly\u2014Australian on the outside and Chinese within. Law\u2019s Saltwater Vase <\/i>(<\/span>2008) is a pale traditional green on which he has placed a mass of crab, lobster, jellyfish, squid, big carnivorous fish, and shoals of minnows. Aylieff\u2019s Blue and White Monumental Vase <\/i>(<\/span>2011) is a tall vase that uses a very Western bold line and drip within traditional Chinese form and colors. Yasuda\u2019s Tableware<\/i> (2011) and Large Bowl<\/i> (2011) are in light pure colors and very plain, depending entirely on elegance of shape not decoration. It is not surprising to learn that Yasuda is inspired by the traditional interconnectedness of Chinese and Japanese art.<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he exhibition at Asia House is devoted to the English artist George Chinnery (1774\u20131852), who, after training in the schools of the Royal Academy in London, took Western art first to British India and then to Canton and neighboring Macau when he was forced to flee his Indian creditors. \u201cThe Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery\u201d covers his entire career. In each locale, he enjoyed success as a portrait painter while also producing some very fine watercolors of the landscapes of Bengal and of Macau. Chinnery was a talented artist, and his pictures on display are also of great historical interest.<\/p>\n

In Canton, the only city in China where international trade was then permitted, and in the Portuguese colony of Macau, Chinnery painted portraits of the leading English, Chinese, and Parsee merchants. In Canton the foreigners lived in \u201chongs,\u201d a combination of house and warehouse with a western fa\u00e7ade, leased to them by Chinese merchants during the trading season, while outside it they lived with their families in Macau. Chinnery had friends among these diverse groups of prosperous businessmen and received many commissions.<\/p>\n

Chinnery\u2019s portraits of the Chinese are his most sensitive, notably Portrait of the Hong Merchant Howqua <\/i>(<\/span>1828) and Portrait of the Hong Merchant Mowqua <\/i>(<\/span>1828). (These were the trading names of Wu Bingjian and Lu Yuankin, respectively). Both are posed in the seated, relaxed, English manner, next to a window opening onto a landscape that gives balance to the picture. Their elegant colored robes and their possessions, including Mowqua\u2019s official hat and his bowl of pedigree goldfish, indicate their high standing among their fellow Chinese. Each portrait is a wonderful combination of informality and displayed status. The artist is also able to bring out the genial extrovert character of Mowqua that made him popular among the Westerners and the dignity and shrewdness of the very wealthy Howqua. Howqua was particularly close to the American traders in Canton and invested considerable sums in American stock. Even in Chinnery\u2019s Family Group (Charles Majoribanks and his family)<\/i> (c.<\/i> 1833), it is the Chinese amah<\/i> (governess), a woman of considerable beauty, who is portrayed most sympathetically. The unfeeling English parents look into the distance but the amah<\/i> looks down at the three children with unfeigned solicitude.<\/p>\n

There is a similar lack of engagement in many of Chinnery\u2019s portraits of other Europeans, but we can see that his pencil, pen, and ink portrait of Hirjibhoy Rustomji<\/span> <\/i>(<\/span>1845), wearing the tall white calico hat of a Parsee, is an intimate sketch of a close friend caught engrossed in his newspaper. Rustomji was one of the first entrepreneurs to buy land in Hong Kong, an indication of how early the Parsees, a Zoroastrian minority from British India, entered the modern global economy.<\/p>\n

During Chinnery\u2019s stay in India from 1802 to 1825, there was a speeding up of the British East India Company\u2019s long transition from being primarily a trading enterprise to being the militarily powerful ruler of much of India, with the administrative and judicial responsibilities that went with this. It was a time of contradictions. There is a world of contrast between Chinnery\u2019s oil painting of the Kirkpatrick Children<\/span> (1805)\u2014who were the offspring of Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick and his very young Indo-Persian wife\u2014dressed in the clothes of the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad and his ceremonial portrait of Sir Henry Russell<\/span>, the Chief Justice of Bengal<\/span> (1807), an utterly English judge in full wig and heavy gown translated to Calcutta. By an odd chance Sir Henry later came to own the painting of the Kirkpatrick children, which he left in his will to Mrs. Kitty Phillipps, the by-then grown-up little Kirkpatrick daughter seen in the portrait.<\/p>\n

Taken together, the exhibitions show the complexity, subtlety, and mutability of the relations between art and society in the West and in Asia. We are beyond the shallow chat about Orientalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cAi Weiwei: Dropping the Urn, Ceramic Work 5000 B.C.\u2013A.D. 2010\u201d at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London & \u201cThe Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery: An English Artist in India and China\u201d at Asia House, London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1313,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[647],"department_id":[557],"issue":[2990],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":47,"value_formatted":47,"value":"47","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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