The Japanese Taste in High Qing Court Decorative Arts

• In Event: Crafting China: Materiality, Decoration, and Global Exchange

Abstract

Although there was no formal diplomatic relationship between Tokugawa Japan and Qing China, trade between them continued from the Chinese port of Ningbo, close to the Qing craft capital of Suzhou. In the eighteenth century, both Japanese imports and Japanese-style elements were regularly seen in the decorative arts of the High Qing court. Maki-e lacquer boxes continued to be imported, differing dramatically from Chinese lacquerwork, but distinctively stylized chrysanthemum forms began to appear on porcelain produced at Jingdezhen. Perhaps the most common element in Chinese court crafts was the application of illusionistic furoshiki patterned wrapping cloths rendered in two- and three-dimensional forms around both vessels and boxes, always a permanent part of the work but only very rarely rendered in actual cloth.
In contrast to the Western or occidentalizing presence often seen in Qing court decorative arts, which has dominated the discourse on foreign taste, the Japanese taste remains little understood. Furthermore, the effects of intra-Asian trade and contact on painting are well established in Japan, but the corollary effects on late imperial Chinese decorative arts have been largely overlooked. By analyzing what objects were imported relative to what stylistic, material, and formal elements were adapted for objects crafted in China, this paper seeks to reorient the significance of Qing court interest in appropriating the exotic in its craftwork away from the West toward other East Asian sources of inspiration.

Author

• Kristina Kleutghen, Washington University in St. Louis