Impossible Stillness

AbstractIn exploring displays in European and North-American museums with regards to Chinese arts, this article discusses how cultural hierarchies from Western hegemonies structure the concept of global art. Here the main focus is on the Meat-Shaped-Stone, carved in Beijing during the late Qing dynasty, and on its travelling trajectory through the international stage. By considering how Western cultural institutions shape practices and languages of incorporation of the other, this article looks at the appearance and disappearance of objects, in the context of the creation of narratives of virtuous national identities, and imaginaries of political salvation through art.Keywords: Marco MusilloChinese artcultural marketingcuratorial practicesEast-West encountersedible objectsglobal tourismMeat-Shaped Stonenational museumsSu ShiTripadvisor Notes1 ‘Stimulation and Reanimation: Cultural and Artistic Exchanges between Asia and Europe’, Conference, 28–30 October 2015, National Palace Museum, Taiwan2 The Cuiyu Baicai, which stands on a cloisonné flowerpot, was probably a dowry gift for Guangxu Emperor’s (光緒帝, r 1875–1908) Consort Jin (瑾妃,1873–1924): it symbolises purity, and through the locust and the katydid presents blessings for having many children.3 This event marked the beginning of an exchange of cultural treasures by Taiwan and Japan that, in 2016, resulted in the Taiwanese exhibition of Japanese artefacts titled: ‘Japanese Art at Its Finest: Masterpieces from The Tokyo and Kyushu National Museums’ (日本美術之最: 東京, 九州國立博物館精品展). The catalogue, with the same title, was published in Chinese and Japanese by the National Palace Museum and curated by Ho Chuan-Hsing and Lin Tieng-Jen.4 As an indication of its importance, in Tokyo the Jadeite-cabbage was housed in the Honkan (本館), the space dedicated to the main display of Japanese art.5 See the catalogue: Jay Xu and Li He, eds, Emperors’ Treasures: Chinese Art from the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Masterworks of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, 20166 On such a reduction, see Wanda J Orlikowski and Susan V Scott, ‘What Happens When Evaluation Goes Online? Exploring Apparatuses of Valuation in the Travel Sector’, Organization Science, vol 25, no 3, 2014, p 8697 Ibid, p 8708 ‘Mi aspettavo di più!’, Tripadvisor review of National Palace Museum, Taipei, 8 September 2016, https://www.tripadvisor.it/Attraction_Review-g13806879-d321216-Reviews-or20-National_Palace_Museum-Shilin_Taipei.html, accessed 9 September 20219 See for example ‘A Fervor to Glimpse “China’s Mona Lisa”’, New York Times, 10 January 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/asia/chinas-mona-lisa-draws-long-lines-and-heightened-fervor-for-culture.html10 See Qin Shao, ‘Exhibiting the Modern: The Creation of the First Chinese Museum, 1905–1930’, The China Quarterly, vol 179, 2004, p 691; Jung-jen Tsai, ‘The Construction of Chinese National Identity and the Design of National Museums during the Early Post-war Period in Taiwan’, in Regionalism, Nationalism & Modern Architecture, Proceedings, CEAA, Porto, 2018, pp 449–464; see also the important study on the Forbidden City Museum’s engagement with international exhibitions: Susan Naquin, ‘The Forbidden City Goes Abroad: Qing History and the Foreign Exhibitions of the Palace Museum, 1974–2004’, T’oung Pao, vol 90, issue 4/5, 2004, pp 341–397.11 ‘Carino’, Tripadvisor review of National Palace Museum, Taipei, 5 September 2015, https://www.tripadvisor.it/Attraction_Review-g13806879-d321216-Reviews-or30-National_Palace_Museum-Shilin_Taipei.html, accessed 21 September 202112 ‘Overrated’, Tripadvisor review of National Palace Museum, Taipei, 24 May 2018, https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g13806879-d321216-r582384945-National_Palace_Museum-Shilin_Taipei.html, accessed 11 April, 202313 ‘World’s Best Collection of Chinese Artifacts’, Tripadvisor review of National Palace Museum, Taipei, https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g13806879-d321216-r575160464-National_Palace_Museum-Shilin_Taipei.html, written on 23 April 2018, accessed 11 April 202314 ‘Beautiful historic museum of treasures from the Forbidden City!’ 11 April 2023, https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g13806879-d321216-r565357900-National_Palace_Museum-Shilin_Taipei.html, written on 9 March 201815 ‘Crockery’, which today indicates tableware, originated at the beginning of the eighteenth century from ‘crock’; in old English ‘croc’, from ‘crocca’ of Germanic origin. For a different meaning and context of ‘crockery’ related to China see Ronald J Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, ‘Between “Crockery-Dom” and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845–47’, American Quarterly, vol 56, no 2, 2004, pp 271–307. Such a European response also comes from the fracture between identifiable artists and their oeuvre, and anonymous works, a fracture that in China and Europe have shaped differently the artistic traditions and created diverse aesthetic perceptions. On this, see Ladislav Kesner, ‘Creative Personality and the Creative Act in the Anonymous Art of China’, Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol 17, Special Issue: Studies in Chinese Art History / Études sur l’histoire de l’art chinois. En homage à Lothar Ledderose, 2008, pp 17–49.16 Within this framework, the issue, not discussed here, of how passing fashions may change the established dialogue between visitors’ cultural identity with regards to canonical arts, represents an important perspective. For example, the early twentieth-century Western passion for Chinese jade in the United States led to the creation of the Bishop Jade Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, nothing remains of it, as it was dismantled in the late 1960s. The catalogue of such a collection was published in 1906, after Heber R Bishop donated to the Museum more than a thousand pieces. A hundred copies were printed and given as diplomatic gifts, including to the Emperor of China. See The Bishop Collection: Investigations and Studies in Jade, privately printed, New York, 1906.17 For important explorations on early modern wunderkammern, see Giuseppe Olmi. ‘Dal “teatro del mondo” ai mondi inventariati. Aspetti e forme del collezionismo nell’età moderna’, in Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Ragioneri, eds, Gli Uffizi: quattro secoli di una galleria, Leo S Olschki, Firenze, 1983, pp 233–269; Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC, 1991, pp 42–5618 See Arthur MacGregor, ed, Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 198319 History of the Ashmolean, https://ashmolean.web.ox.ac.uk/history-ashmolean, accessed 20 September 202120 Ibid21 ‘Relational aesthetics’ is a term created by curator Nicolas Bourriaud in Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle, Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 1998.22 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 1 January 2004, p 67; see also Jason Miller, ‘Activism vs. Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond’, FIELD. A Journal of Socially-Engaged Criticism 3, 2016, pp 165–18323 This kind of mimetic play is not a rarity in Chinese art. Such pieces are, in fact, not difficult to find, and their iconographical patterns are also well known. For example, the image of a rat eating a piece of pork corresponds to the wishes of a wealthy household, rendered by the expression ‘jiafei wurun’ (家肥屋潤), which indicates that the house has an oversupply of meat. See Terese Tse Bartholomew, Hidden meanings in Chinese art = Zhongguo ji xiang tu an, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, 2006, p 162.24 For Su Shi, see, for example: Ronald C Egan, Word, Image and Deed in the Life of Su Shi, Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994. Also, for related studies on food literature see: Siufu Tang and Isaac Yue, ‘Food and the Literati: The Gastronomic Discourse of Imperial Chinese , in Isaac Yue and Siufu Tang, eds, Scribes of Gastronomy Representations of Food and Drink in Imperial Chinese Literature, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2013, pp 1–14; Weijie Song, ‘Emotional Topography, Food Memory, and Bittersweet Aftertaste: Liang Shiqiu and the Lingering Flavor of Home’, Journal of Oriental Studies, vol 45, nos 1–2, 2012, pp 89–105.25 On the type of cultural recollections from Su Shi’s Chibi fu, see: Robert E Hegel, ‘The Sights and Sounds of Red Cliffs: On Reading Su Shi’, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, vol 20, 1998, pp 11–30.26 See Xiaoring Li, ‘Eating, Cooking, and Meaning-Making: Ming-Qing Women’s Poetry on Food’/飲食、烹調與意義創造: 明清女性詩歌中的食物描寫’, Journal of Oriental Studies, vol 45, no 1–2, 2012, p 30; for the original Chinese see Su Shi, ‘Wen zi you shou’ in Zhang Zhilie et al, eds, 蘇軾全集校注 Su Shi quanji jiaozhu, Hebei renmin chubanshe, Shijiazhuang Shi, 2010, vol 7, no 41, p 487427 In the new online caption is a sentence which develops the old passage mentioned here: ‘The visual features here perfectly convey the color of braised pork and can even elicit its aroma and taste in the viewer’s mind, not only preserving the essence of Chinese culinary tradition but also recalling fond memories of this dish.’, https://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh106/NorthandSouth-4/en/index.html, accessed 7 October 2021.28 Emperors’ Treasures: Chinese Art from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, https://exhibitions.asianart.org/exhibitions/emperors-treasures-chinese-art-from-the-national-palace-museum-taipei/, accessed 15 September 202129 I here paraphrase Erika Fischer-Lichte discussing the view of Chinese theatre by Westerners, ‘Intercultural Misunderstanding as Aesthetic Pleasure’, in Richard J Brunt and Werner Enninger, Interdisciplinary Perspectives at Cross-Cultural Communication, Rader Verlag, Aachen, 1985, p 90.30 Robin B Boast, ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited’, Museum Anthropology, vol 34, no 1, 2011, p 57; Tony Bennet, Culture: A Reformer’s Science, Sage, London, 1998, p 21331 Viola Koenig et al, eds, Concept for the Presentation of the Non-European Collections in the Humboldt Forum Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst [2009], Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 2012, p 21. The text quoted here is the English translation of ‘Der Lange Weg’, part 2 in Baessler Archiv, 59, 2012, pp 113–192.32 Ibid p 1933 Ibid, p 834 Nanette Snoep, ‘Suggestions for a Post-Museum’, in Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, eds, Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2020, p 32535 Syed Hussein Alatas, ‘The captive mind in development studies. Some neglected problems and the need for an autonomous social science tradition in Asia’, International Social Science Journal, vol 24, no 1, 1972, pp 11–1236 National Portrait Gallery, ‘About Us’, https://www.npg.org.uk/about/, accessed 10 October 202137 For the entire text translated in English by Qasim Swati, see ‘Malala’, 3 October 2018, https://www.npg.org.uk/blog/malala, accessed 12 October 2022.38 See ‘Creative Connections’, https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/creativeconnections/home/, accessed 12 October 202239 National Portrait Gallery, ‘Search the collection’, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitplace/243, accessed 12 October 202140 Bruno Brulon Soares and Anna Leshchenko, ‘Museology in Colonial Contexts: A Сall for Decolonisation of Museum Theory. Museología en contextos coloniales: Una llamada a la descolonización de la teoría museal’, ICOFOM Study Series 46, 2018, pp 68–6941 On this, see Simon Knell, ‘National Museums and the National Imagination’, in Simon Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Bugge Amundsen, et al, eds, National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, Routledge, London and New York, 2014, pp 3–2842 Chris Wingfield, ‘Placing Britain in the British Museum’, in Knell, Aronsson, Bugge, National Museums, op cit, p 13543 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Museums and the Savage Sublime’, in Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, eds, Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial, Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2020, p 45