The Craft of Teaching: Transmission and Reinvention of Nineteenth-Century European Aesthetic Movements in Shanghai

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

Abstract

It is generally held that nineteenth-century European aesthetic movements such as the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement had little influence outside of Europe or the European colonial context. On the surface this statement seems applicable to China, where these foreign styles were found completely transplanted and insulated within the segregated semicolonial spaces like the Bund or the French Concession in Shanghai.
While the look (forms?) of these foreign styles was generally not adopted by native Chinese artisans and craftsmen, in this paper I underscore that progressive, Christian ideas and ideals about crafting and handiwork were promulgated and systematically transmitted in places like the Shanghai Tushanwan Orphanage workshops by Jesuit missionaries to Chinese orphan boys. Traditional Chinese motifs and ornaments were reinterpreted and used instead of European ones, but because these were primarily made for Western consumers they were often dismissed either as an updated chinoiserie or as outright commercial kitsch. Through a thorough investigation of the operation and products made at the woodcarving workshop at Tushanwan, I argue for the reexamination of works created by Tushanwan orphan artisans under a lens beyond that of colonialism or straightforward Orientalism; this was a process of reinvention and reappropriation of the latest modern European aesthetics in a Chinese context. And like the socio-political impact these aesthetic movements had in nineteenth-century Europe, the orphans’ works on the exterior of King Leopold II of Belgium’s Chinese Pavilion at Laeken, Brussels illustrates a strong sense of Chinese nationalism was fostered through the research and production of these commercial works.

Author

• William Ma, University of California, Berkeley