In Search of National Ornament: Writing Socialist Craft

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

Abstract

The development of the modern design studies in China was given official support by the founding of the Central Academy of Craft and Design in 1956. Propelled by the Ten Great Buildings project, the Central Academy was established in part to research and coordinate the extensive decorative programs that would ensure production of functional objects consistent with the monumental architectural structures. Like other endeavors to create national culture during the early Maoist period, the design projects were motivated by the desire to create a national style properly expressive of a confident state, one that would graft multi-ethnic regional craft industries with the international authority of Soviet-inflected neoclassical monumentality.

Fundamental to the project of national style was the documentation of craft history by historians and practitioners. This paper examines the processes of achieving national ornament, focusing in particular the efflorescence of writing histories of craft at midcentury, and their relationship to both codifying regional craft production and discursively constructing communal and cosmopolitan histories for official decorative motifs. Composed at a pivotal moment in which local or regional industries were reorganized under state regulation, and debates over craft’s classification as either light industry or art object, histories of craft—textiles, costume, paper, ceramics, and more—figured craft objects as the surface materialization of collective knowledge, the essence of the people. Tian Zibing’s History of Chinese Craft Art, one of the first general histories of craft in the twentieth century, is examined alongside its predecessors.

Author

• Christine Ho, University of Massachusetts Amherst