Abstract
Chinamania has been phenomenally hit for a long time in history since the appreciation of Chinese ancient art and culture in the European society was developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. In this case study of the porcelain installation art exhibition in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the author tried to explore dialogism between the porcelain installation art works and the ancient Chinese art, as well as their symbolic and cultural meaning in the networks of contemporary art world. Meanwhile, the comparison between the installation art works and Ai Weiwei’s avant-garde ceramic artworks will be applied to see the happening of art reproduction and the rediscovery of artistic values in globalization.
Research problem
- What’s the history background of chinamania in the 17-18th European society and what’s the symbolic meaning of the porcelain decorations at that time and now?
- Case Study: How is McConell’s porcelain installation art influenced by and dialogic the history of chinamania and the porcelain design and production in China? How is the porcelain installation art work cohesive with the “peacock room” in the museum interface?
- What’s difference and shared commons between the types of porcelain installation art and Ai Weiwei’s ceramic avant-garde artworks?
- What’s the cultural meaning of the porcelain and ceramic artworks in the networks of contemporary art world?
“It’s getting harder and harder every day to live up to my blue and white china.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
A frenzy mania for Chinese art and culture swept through the Europe during the 1870s, as the Chinese decorations were increasingly exported to the European market. The blue-and-white Chinese porcelain was phenomenally popular and particularly appreciated as one of the most priceless treasures at that time. Oscar Wilde, the great novelist in Victorian society, was famous for collecting the blue and white porcelain during the period of China-mania.
Nowadays, the Chinese art and culture has been widely spread, developed and reinterpreted in multiple genres of art forms globally. For instance, Chinamania, the exhibition currently on display in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C., has epitomized the Chinese and orient culture with delicate porcelains and installation art works, creatively reflecting the obsession and curiosity about Chinese craftmanship during the 17th and 18th centuries in the European society.
History: Chinamania, Porcelain and European Society
Chinamania, a vivid expression of frenzy love for Chinese style art and culture, derived from the global trade during the 17th and 18th century when more and more European merchants crowded into the southeastern coast of China and traded for tea, porcelain and silk.
As Early as the 13th century, the Italian merchant, Marco Polo, has been to China for trade and travel for a long time. After coming back to the Europe, he wrote a book, The Travels of Marco Polo, to record his experience in China and other countries in East Asia with regards to the wealth and culture there. It was so provoking for the Europeans since they, for the first time, were able to know about the mysterious Orient and ancient China for the details directly from a book. Marco Polo’s book greatly contributed to depicting a prosperous ancient China, and arousing people’s imagination of the mysterious Orient country. It was even the initial impetus for the European merchants to explore and trade with China. As the Portuguese and Dutch merchants arrived in China during the 16th century, they began shipping the blue-and-white porcelains home along with the silks and spices that inspired the Age of Exploration, and later came the British merchants in 17th century with larger scale trade in the Orient. On the other side, the developed oceanic silk road also served to export large amounts of Chinese goods to the Europe and they became relatively competitive in the market. In the 1870s, a new word Chinoiserie has been used by the British to describe the Chinese style, to some extent, it represents the progressive understanding of the Chinese culture among the British public, even being proud of collecting Chinese antiques and talking about Chinese culture.
Among the imported Chinese merchandises, the blue-and-white porcelains were particularly rare and precious in constantly high demands due to their delicate craftsmanship and replication complexity, thus being granted as the invaluable gifts usually for the royal families and aristocracies. Gradually, the porcelain as the symbol of wealth and social status was acknowledged by the European public, and until today, we could still see the 18th century exported Chinese porcelains in some western private collections and galleries.

A Theory of Everything, Walter McConnell.
Case Study: the Chinamania Exhibition in Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
As is shown in the video, two porcelain installation art works are displayed near one of the entrances of the exhibition room, as they are the most eye-catching and appealing items in this exhibition. These porcelain installation art works are constituted of stacks of porcelains in diverse shapes and styles, some of which are the well-known characters from cartoons or fairy tales, some are plants and animals in the nature, others are the great persons in history, e.g. Ludwig van Beethoven, and Abraham Lincoln. In the form of tradition Chinese art, these porcelain art pieces were in fact created from 3D scans of the porcelain originals. The multiples were replicated and recombined to produce various tokens of porcelain installation art works, and were granted the name – A theory of Everything. As the supplementation of the other Chinamania exhibition, these installation artworks also serve as another “outgoing” interpretation of the Peacock Room Remix – an immersive installation by painter Darren Waterston, reimagines James McNeill Whistler’s famous Peacock Room – an icon of American art. Inside of it should be a great collection of the ancient Chinese porcelains, however, it imitates a destroyed and after-fighting scene; when stepping into the room and immersed in the dim lighting environment, you’ll be immediately attracted by the broken porcelains and hear some low-mood tunes as if someone is murmuring in the dark.
The creator, Walter McConnell, is currently the professor of Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. He specializes in installations of moist clay and towering assemblages of cast porcelain, and he’s most recognized for his unfired ceramic installations addressing the relationship between nature and culture. The series of porcelain installation art works, A Theory of Everything, reflected his exploration of nature and culture through the mixtures of figures and characters, meanwhile, they also represented the dialogues between the creator and audience, which is also one of the appealing aspects of the installation arts. McConnell got the inspiration from his travel to China in 2002 and witnessed the porcelain production sites at Jingdezhen, which is honored as the capital of Chinese porcelain. Therefore, this porcelain installation art works obviously dialogic to the Chinese art craftmanship. In McConnell’s minds, the porcelain installation sculptures not only represent the western interpretation of Chinese arts, but also the long-term appreciation of porcelains within the cultural contexts of Chinamania. “This is evidence not only of a collective unconscious but also of the larger cultural contexts in which objects accrue value and meaning.”
A Theory of Everything, such porcelain sculptures as the typical installation art, is an interesting case to look into. From a single porcelain to a great collection of porcelain installation with cultural and symbolic meaning, from singularity to multiplicity, the insight that the context in which an artwork is presented influences the experience and meaning of the work, meanwhile, the creator also struggles to express the meaning to the audience with the utilization of the interface and materials at most.
“The essence of installation art is, according to Reiss, spectator participation.” I’ve been to the exhibition for twice. Though it wasn’t crowded at all in the exhibition, I could still feel the visitors were curious about these marvelous installation art works – everyone spent time slowly walking around and around the stacks, stopped to watch the figures and read the introduction labels on the wall, evaluating the replicated stacks of Chinese style while created by western artist. I ever talked to guarding person in the exhibition room while watching these art works for the first time. I asked him about his feelings to see the installation art works, and he said, “I’ve been serving for the military for many years and hardly did I get a chance to closely look at such high-arts in the gallery, I was curious about it when I first saw it and I think it’s wonderful. And I like to see people coming to appreciate these special arts.” I was glad to hear that he found it amazing, and gradually realized that the installation art as one of the typical genres in contemporary arts, might usually be acceptable and welcomed by the public since it strikes the sensual feelings of people in a more direct approach.
When gazing at the porcelain installation art works at first, I was easily attracted by the diversity of characters and figures of every single porcelain, and I would unconsciously try to recognize as many as I could, or even count how many layers there are; then I would get closer to stare at the porcelain materials and think about how they are connected and attached to each other – for me, a visitor with Chinese cultural background, I would be definitely appealed to this specially designed installation artwork for the sense of familiarity and pay attention to every detail – it is the cultural encyclopedia that aroused my interests towards the art work, “the encyclopedia is a useful description for how we relate interpretants (at many levels) to symbolic information to generate meanings”; “Our learned codes for associating signs and symbols with their cultural meanings are a function of this macro-cultural Encyclopedia”.

A Theory of Everything, Walter McConnell.
Comparison: Ai Weiwei’s Avant-garde Porcelain Work
Ai Weiwei is a renowned Chinese avant-garde artist, architect as well as an activist. He is blunt in expressing his opinions in art, politics and social issues, and this makes him to be a controversial person in China. Other than that, he has contributed a lot to the field of art and design. In his early years, he dropped school in film studies and moved to New York and lived there for over 12 years. There he met some artists, like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and was influenced by the new Dadaism and the Fluxus movement, which have strong impact on his later art work in installation, photography and design. He ever served as artistic consultant on the design of the Bird Nest – the main stadium for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Some of Ai’s best known works are installations, often tending towards the dynamic and sparkling dialogue between the contemporary art world and traditional Chinese arts.

Ai Weiwei
In the 1990s, Ai Weiwei has done something surprisingly – dropping the urn made in Han Dynasty. This iconoclastic appropriations of historic clay pots and porcelain vases raised endless questions about Ai and his arts – many people appreciate and even look highly of the precious porcelain art work, while he broke it easily all of a sudden, so what drove him to do so? In his eyes, he broke them because he wanted to preserve and develop the ancient Chinese arts based on the original ways of ceramic and porcelain production. Just like Walter McConnell, Ai was also partly influenced by the mass production of porcelains in Jingdezhen, however, he was kind of unsatisfied with the way of firing them, thinking that it was different from the way of making them in Qing Dynasty. In order to closely observe and record the process of breaking the vases, he broke them.

Dropping the Urn, Ai Weiwei.
Ai also created other interesting ceramic vases with colorful patterns and even famous brands and logos on it – the Coca Cola Vase, for example, is a smart combination – a Twentieth Century logo painted upon a two-thousand year old vase; the emblem of an American brand emblazoned on an ancient Chinese artifact, a unique hand-crafted object adorned with the ornament of mass-production. The great contrast between the material and pattern are so eye-catching that it even recreate the artifact and more people will be able to rediscover the value of such an antiqued ceramic vase.

Coca-Cola Vase, Ai Weiwei.
Conclusion: Reproduction, Rediscovery and Beyond
Art is emerging, globalizing, and remixing. Even the antiqued and regional artworks are valuable and welcomed to recreate in the contemporary art world. The Chinamania and its progressive development is typical in that it’s constantly being studied, reproduced and remixed even in today’s world. The porcelain and ceramic artworks were originally precious in themselves filled with priceless symbolic meanings. Both Walter McConnell and Ai Weiwei are trying to reproduce them with their own ways of interpretation, bringing them to the contemporary art work and rediscover their artistic values in exhibitions to the public. The installation art work with 3D technologies creating the porcelain replicas and diverse characters has got more people involved to see the porcelain art works, whereas the Dropping Urn and Coca-Cola Vase are more straightforward in breaking the traditional art forms and reinventing the old fashions. Therefore, the globalization of the artworks, in its essence, is an approach to reproduce and rediscover the art works, which will also arouse more people’s interests to appreciate the global artworks and get them an opportunity to enrich their cultural experience.
Reference
- Patricia Bjaaland Welch, China Mania! – The Global Passion For Porcelain 800-1900. Passage, 2014.
- Vivian Van Saaze, Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing Artworks. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Print.
- Irvine Martin, Introduction to Visual and Pictorial Semiotics: De-Blackboxing Meaning-Making in Art and Visual Media, Communication, Culture & Technology Program. Georgetown University, 2017.
- Oscar Wilde’s China love: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/chinamania-now-open-at-the-freer-gallery-388091/
- Chinoiserie: http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83726a/201005/35869639.html
- http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/chinamania/theory-everything.asp
- Ai Weiwei Dropping the Urn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHRU9k2zNA
- http://fashion.163.com/14/0428/23/9QV2GP7D00264MK3.html
- Coca Cola Vase: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/contemporary-art-evening-auction-l14024/lot.56.html