Jingdezhen Porcelain As Mindful Matter

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

Abstract

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, images depicting porcelain production circulated on a global scale, some of which derived from a Qing imperial album commissioned by the Qianlong emperor referred to as Taoyetu (ca. 1743) in court documents. In addition to painted albums for the court, porcelain production pictures encompassed woodblock prints, export watercolor sets, to designs on surfaces of porcelain pieces themselves, traversing political and linguistic borders that included France, England, and Japan.
Despite the ubiquity of images depicting the making of porcelain, little attention has been said about porcelain in art history beyond connoisseurship. Scholarly narratives of chinoiserie, while acknowledging the significance of porcelain in world history and cultural encounter – particularly of the blue-and-white variety—tend to focus on chinaware’s impact on the development of gender and class identities in Europe.
This paper recuperates the artisanal aspects of porcelain by appealing to the porcelain objects themselves. Specifically, I pay attention to the material strategies employed by porcelain artisans to produce what we understand as painted decoration. Through a close mapping of the global transfer of materials, techniques, and manuals about porcelain-making, I show that it is possible to discern an artisanal epistemology, as Pamela Smith has achieved for early modern Europe, that depends upon the materiality of porcelain. In so doing, the work of “chinaware” artisans produced an object that was both art and craft.

Author

• Ellen Huang, University of San Francisco