Author(s)

Meichen Liu

Corresponding Author

Meichen Liu

ABSTRACT

China has a long-established history of porcelain production. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1991), participation in global trade brought more dynamics in Chinese porcelain manufacturing. In order to serve the growing western market, Chinese potters altered designs to accommodate the Western taste, resulting in a new category of porcelain production: China export porcelain. This paper will examine three groups of objects in the Phillips Museum of Art to illustrate the changing roles of China imported porcelains in Early America, and how Americans endowed the chinawares with new social meanings to establish its national power. The first group includes a famille-verte patchbox with figurative decoration, and an Imari plate with painted motifs of a garden scene. The second group includes a ceramic punch bowl, and the third group includes a set of a famille-rose teacup and saucer, and a blue-and-white small dish painted in typical Canton style. Through visual evidence and comparison with porcelain wares made for Chinese domestic market, and those that were made specifically for export, it can be concluded that the chinawares at the Phillips Museum of Art are specifically made for the western market. Through the analysis of the iconographies of the painted patterns, and the close examination of material and forms, this paper argued that the three groups of chinaware manifest that the changing role of Chinese porcelain. It went from a vehicle for imagination and curiosity in America, to an American’s performance of national power in the global trade, and finally turned into cheap commodities in America due to its inferior production, loss of commercial monopoly power and Americans’ gradual dominant power over the Chinese porcelain production. This paper argued that global trade assigns an array of values different from the ones generated in the original culture that produced these export products, and accentuates how meanings transfer and transform in cross-cultural contacts.

KEYWORDS

Globalization, Chinese ceramics, colonial art, American material culture, porcelain, global market