Museum Tour - Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore

Monstrous Beauty is a fascinating, actually a challenging exhibition. It tells you the story and celebrates Chinoiserie coming from the East to Europe, creating almost like a craze and fascination about it. But with it came also a projection, a fantasy, a very misconceived idea of the East that we reveal in an exhibition. Chinoiserie, when people typically think of this historical style, they tend to think of porcelain. But the style itself actually encompasses a broad range of material objects, as well as the imitations that Europeans later made of this material that they first encountered from China. But for me, another sort of element of Chinoiserie is the ideas and the projections and the fantasies that accompanied those objects when they first came. We tend to think of luxury objects as just sort of inert things that are occupying space, maybe in your living room or in your home. But I think those things did things to people in the sense that that desire for luxury spurred an entire kind of industry of the imagination that Europe has kind of been obsessed with ever since the 16th century. And so I was sort of interested in seeing how we might be able to bring out those projections and fantasies and stereotypes and to sort of manifest those in the space alongside the very beautiful objects that first sparked those ideas. The exhibition, Monstrous Beauty, looks at the history of Chinoiserie through a feminist lens. And it importantly is pairing historical works of this highly ornate effeminate style that Europe invented in a kind of fantasy image of what they thought the Far East was with contemporary works of art by Asian and Asian-American women artists. And the contemporary works are really important because they allow us a new entry point into that history and to see Chinoiserie through a completely new lens. Of course, it's true that Chinoiserie has always been described as a feminine style, one associated with feminine taste. But I think the important distinction between feminine and feminist is that feminine is a descriptive term, whereas feminist is political and operative. Feminist is a position that you adopt consciously in order to change perspective. And I think it's really important to think about that as a structuring device. It's wonderful to have the contemporary artist Patti Chang joining me as part of this tour of Monstrous Beauty. I think for me, it was really important to think about her work in this historical context of porcelain because she really did bring this other perspective to bear on it in the sense that we see countless objects decorated with Asian women. But then to have that suddenly ruptured by this actual Asian-American woman performing acts of incredible comic timing but also violence allows us to think about the relationship between those historical fantasies and contemporary notions of the self. The story of Europe's obsession with porcelain begins in the 16th century with the first ships going to Asia and bringing back this material. Originally, porcelain was actually used as ballast to balance the weight of the ship so that it wouldn't capsize. But very quickly, the merchants realized that this was an incredibly lucrative cargo that they could actually sell once they got to Europe. So what you're looking at is a piece of shipwrecked porcelain from 1613 that was discovered from a shipwreck off the coast of St. Helena on a Dutch ship known as de Wittelo. What I love about it is this little tiny porcelain teacup lodged in there like a tooth. It gives it a kind of instant monstrous beauty. And I think it's a wonderfully evocative object of both the voracious demand for porcelain that emerged in Europe by the 16th century as well as being a kind of symbol of the great dangers involved in bringing this precious commodity from China. I think for me, what's interesting about this early period is, yes, it's full of adventure, these kind of merchant marauding pirates, but it's also very much about violence and conflict-driven encounters over this material that subsequent to this becomes this sort of symbol of purity. Mary II was the Queen of England. She wasn't particularly powerful like Queen Elizabeth during the Tudor period, but she's really the figure who creates a kind of craze among women collectors in particular in the early 18th century for chinoiserie, particularly examples of delftware, which is a form of Dutch earthenware that she helped to flourish. At first, an imitation of the Chinese and Japanese ceramics that they saw in Holland, but then later on they created quite monumental and extravagant objects such as the tulip vase. So what we're looking at here is a flower pyramid or a bloom pyramid, and it was made by the Moorshead factory in Delft in Holland at the end of the 17th century, and what this was essentially intended for was for cut flowers. So at each of the nine levels of this stacked pyramid, you would pour water into these vessels, and then the spouts that you see at each corner, you would be able to put different kinds of flowers in. What's interesting about this piece is that in addition to these molded elements of decoration, are these women figures sort of repeated and decorating, and of course repetition is one of the themes of chinoiserie and the creation of that pattern, but you know the issue of race of course is another element of chinoiserie in the sense that there is a kind of racialization of these figures, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. When we met and you gave me the presentation of your exhibition and went through the checklist, and you showed me this piece, I had very complex feelings about it, and I was really interested in when you are the person placing flowers into the vase, where are they looking? And sure enough, it's looking at you, like the eyes are painted so that it's looking up at you. Wow. And that like visual connection or the connection of the eyes was disturbing, it signals any erotics. Like there were so many complex feelings that I had about this, you know that it would be looking at me as I was placing this flower into its porcelain throat. And actually you touch upon a lot of the issues in this exhibition, which is that chinoiserie as a decorative ornate style is never supposed to look back at you. It's a delayed response where you don't see the people, you see the decoration and the ornament and the pattern. And I think you really hit upon something, which is the fact that you saw the face first in that encounter. Adding that layer of complexity, I think, is exactly the story that we're trying to tell in the exhibition. Yeah. I mean, just looking at it now too and thinking about hierarchy, at the bottom we have the animal, and then we have the female figure, and then we have the multitude of men, and then we have royalty at the top. So I'm also just thinking about the history of colonization in relation to the Dutch and the British and how that's manifested here very, very clearly. And I think that's another thing that struck me about this piece is thinking effectively about cruelty and sadness in relation to subjugation and slavery. Can I ask a more basic question too? Sure. Do you think it's beautiful? That's a hard question. I do. I mean, I do. I think it's... So complex. And I think that complexity is beautiful. I think what's interesting about tea and why it's important to the story of chinoiserie is that tea was, in fact, an exotic beverage. And it was not, quote, native to Europe in the early modern period. And yet very quickly after the 17th century, I would say, it was immediately adopted as a cultural practice by Europeans. And England in particular, it became adopted as a sort of national practice in a way. And more than that, it very quickly becomes a part of gendered performances of politeness. And women become the buyers of these accessories for tea. What's interesting about this is on the one hand, tea is used to project this image of domesticity and this idea of women belonging in the home. On the other hand, it symbolizes a kind of growing anxiety about women as consumers and having the power to potentially undermine the power of their husbands or their fathers with this sort of purchasing power. That concept of boycotting emerges in the 18th century as well, where to buy or not to buy becomes a form of protest and one that was very much driven by women consumers. The arrival of tea in England also signaled its growing power as a kind of global commercial power with major trade routes, not only to Asia, but to the Americas as well. And the sort of unseen cost of all this, of course, was slavery and the exploitation of labor and colonialism. The point was that you were not supposed to see the kind of toil that would sully the sort of great shine and sheen of these costly objects. And for us today, it makes it look like a very different scene than it did in the 18th century. Up until now, we think of porcelain in terms of useful objects, things that you drink out of, things that you eat off of. What happens when you think of porcelain as a material used to depict humans? What I think is really interesting about porcelain figurines is that they're quite different from the typical 18th century marble sculpture. The standard and ideal of beauty being the nude woman. Chinoiserie figurines are very different, firstly in being clothed, also racialized in many cases. But the other important aspect is the scale, because they're never bigger than something that could fit on a tabletop. So these are really intended to be placed somewhere in the home. And I think that really creates certain conditions for how we read these objects as purely ornamental, something that doesn't have an inner life, or some kind of deeper philosophical meaning. And I wanted to see if, in fact, they are telling a deeper story about changing images of women, and how fantasies and projections and stereotypes were constructed through these highly decorative pieces. So what you're looking at is a reclining female porcelain figurine in a red dress, made in China for the export market to Europe, probably around 1750. And I think what's so interesting about them is it potentially shows a pregnant figure. And that's incredibly unusual in Chinese art. I love that these figures are reading. So there's a process of intellection at play. And I think that punctures a lot of the sort of assumptions we make about these figurines from the 18th century. In a lot of ways, the 18th century is really seen as the key moment of chinoiserie. And something really interesting happens with chinoiserie in the sense that it continues well into the 1920th, of course, 21st century. But it's sort of mediated by two forms of technology, which is photography and film. And I really saw them as continuous in the sense that film and photography, like porcelain, are glossy, reproductive media, upon which projections of fantasies were circulated. And I think looking at those connections allows you to see porcelain as a kind of vehicle for ideas. At the same time, it allows you to see how the sorts of cultural stereotypes that emerged in the 18th century carried over into film and photography. One of the starting points for this exhibition was trying to find a way to talk through chinoiserie's links to the Atlanta shootings in 2021, and specifically that being an incredibly tragic and difficult event for the Asian American community. So that was one of the issues that I was grappling with when I approached you to create a commission for the exhibition. If I remember, our conversation kind of revolved around, how does politics enter this exhibition? And especially because of all the historical works, would it seem out of place to then introduce the politics of today? And one night, I just woke up in the middle of the night and had the idea that I should make a massage table out of porcelain to be in the show. We were able to figure out a viable way to make it with Kohler, and Kohler being this industrial manufacturer of the 20th century that used vitreous porcelain and their sort of secret recipe to make toilet sinks, urinals, which is a type of porcelain that's very close to our bodies, that supports our bodies. And so I was really interested in this as the context for the piece already. So talk to me about the holes, because initially when we had discussed this piece, it was really just a massage table. And at some point in the process, you decided to puncture it with holes. When we started, I had absolutely no idea what it was going to look like. And I sort of approached it more from like functionality. So the piece is in the form of a massage table. But after the show is done, I want to sink it to the bottom of the ocean to become a substrate for growing other sea organisms. So to be the support or the ground for other life to live. And with holes, the water can actually filter through it easily, and it can be dropped down. So it does actually have a functional reason for being there. But there's also something about these holes where one has sort of an uncanny experience with it. I wanted people to approach it and to first recognize the form of the massage table, to feel that it is three-dimensional and could be real. And then I wanted them to be able to see these holes in the surface and in the legs. And then if people do take the opportunity to look underneath, then to see that the whole bottom part, including the legs, is what is glazed. It looks like skin and it's called coral. So I thought actually that was the perfect color. And then this, of course, is cobalt where we dripped it. And so people who do actually come down and see it, then they get this void or this abyssal where it looks to be underwater. And I chose actually the title abyssal because that's an oceanic term that was made, I want to say, late 1600s when European countries were starting to travel across the ocean for trade and expansion. And so both abyssal and abysmal are oceanic terms. Oh, that's fascinating. I didn't know that. Yeah. And that came from that time. So it means like the depths. And of course, they use abyssal when they talk about the deepest parts of the ocean, the abyssal plain. But also the other notion or idea or meaning of abyssal is unknowable, inconceivable. And of course, the word unfathomable because fathoms is how you measure the dips. Right. That's fascinating. I mean, the other interesting thing, too, as we're sitting here under the piece, is that in reference to the massage table, which, of course, you know, anyone who goes to a spa, you're always on the upper surface, right? And no one sees the bottom of the massage table. So it's this kind of inversion of that whole notion of what it's for. And the other thing, too, I was thinking is the sort of labor is all up here on the surface. And again, this question of what's on the other side, I think, is another key aspect of this piece in the show. This idea of puncturing illusions and surface images and seeing what's beneath it, I think, is a theme that runs throughout the exhibition as well. When I met with Lee Sookyung in Korea, she recounted to me the story of her mother telling her that in Korea, a woman's body is like a porcelain bowl. Once it's chipped, you can never use it again. This kind of notion of propriety and brokenness, such a complex and loaded way of thinking about a material. And I definitely think these works respond to that in a lot of ways. This idea that you're starting with things that were already made and broken and that you're trying to put back together, but in a way that's completely different. I think that's really evocative for many people. When you even think about your own life, nothing happens on a straight timeline. It's always going back, repairing, rebuilding, reconfiguring. What I really love about these pieces, too, is that integral to her sculptural process is using the cracks and the breaks as sort of key visual element in her pieces by highlighting them with gold. And this is a repair technique that you see across Asia that's been around actually for a very long time. And what I really love about it is that it's kind of a metaphor for life in a way, because what makes you unique, individual, and different is not other characteristics that are same as others, but it's your experiences. It's the scars that you've accumulated over a lifetime. And she's really highlighting that and using that as a sort of beautiful visual element in her pieces. One thing I think that maybe we bring in thinking about Shimazuri is the idea of interiority, which I think is not something that's really generally thought about. You mean an inner life, right? Exactly. An inner life. The interiority versus just the exteriority. Yeah, I totally agree. And again, I think what is a key part of this show is that the viewer is operating on the work, right? In the sense that looking can actually shape the way the work is perceived and can change the meaning of the work in a lot of ways. And that's something that I really hope that viewers visiting this show will take away from the exhibit. It's really inviting viewers to think about how this style continues to interact with our daily lives, but also to think about it more critically and contemplate how is it that a porcelain vase may have shaped certain very strong cultural stereotypes about people? How does that relate to the way I see the world today? And how might I think about that in a different perspective?