Traveling Culture and Asian Export Art

Chi-ming Yang explores the role of Asian export art, porcelain in particular, in capturing the global circulation of humans, objects, and animals in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Chi-ming Yang, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania

This presentation considers the role of Asian export art, porcelain in particular, in capturing the global circulation of humans, objects, and animals in the 17th and 18th centuries.  For one, the King Charles spaniel and the Pug were both East Asian breeds of dog brought to England and domesticated—indeed, bred as symbols of national culture—and then rendered into porcelain miniatures through being commissioned and reproduced in China and sent back to England.  In addition, both works created for Western markets and Western imitations of Eastern manufactures featured hybrid designs of New World, African, and Asian iconography; in some cases, chinoiserie plays a crucial role in memorializing and romanticizing the brutalities of African slave labor.  Indeed, the transatlantic trade in slaves in connection with the Asian trade in commodities is part of a continuum of European colonialism.  The interrelated status of these Eastern copies offers a unique perspective on trade, labor, and race relations between the West and East Indies in the early modern period.