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World Art

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Meeting another China: exhibiting Chinese [folk] art and popular culture in the Orient Museum Rui Oliveira Lopes To cite this article: Rui Oliveira Lopes (2014) Meeting another China: exhibiting Chinese [folk] art and popular culture in the Orient Museum, World Art, 4:2, 237-261, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2014.937505 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2014.937505

Published online: 07 Nov 2014.

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Date: 27 October 2015, At: 04:36

World Art, 2014 Vol. 4, No. 2, 237–261, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2014.937505 Research article

Meeting another China: exhibiting Chinese [folk] art and popular culture in the Orient Museum Rui Oliveira Lopes*

Downloaded by [117.169.1.131] at 04:36 27 October 2015

Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, CIEBA, Largo da Academia Nacional de Belas-Artes, Lisbon, Portugal This paper examines the role of Western museums, in particular the Museu do Oriente (Orient Museum) in Lisbon, Portugal, concerning the display of Chinese folk art and popular culture, contributing to a wider perspective of the image of China, after 500 years of artistic and cultural exchange between Portugal, Macau and China. The Orient Museum comprises a large collection of Chinese art and material culture which offers a wider perspective of Greater China. One aspect of the collection provides a ‘mirror’ of the cultural and artistic exchange between Portugal and China, while the other presents another perspective on China, focusing on the regional distinctiveness of Chinese ethnicity, religious traditions and the unique artistic practices of different regions of China. Unlike the typical porcelain, silk, furniture and other artworks that became familiar to Europeans as a result of global trade during the Modern period, the folk art and popular material culture from different regions presents another perspective on Chinese art and culture, traditionally considered within the scope of ethnography and therefore unworthy of display in encyclopaedic or art museums in the West. The main topics discussed in this paper include how Western communities perceive Chinese artistic, cultural and religious heterogeneity, how the museum acts as a place for intercultural dialogue through curatorial practices and parallel activities, the role of the museum in the conception of a nonstereotypical image of China, and the preservation of regional cultures as part of Greater China. Keywords: appropriate museology; folk art; popular culture; Chinese art; exhibitions; post-colonialism; performing arts; ritual objects

Collecting Chinese art and material culture in Portugal The relationship between China and Portugal dates back to the first decades of the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese settled in the trading ports of Calicut and Malacca, and later Macau. Thereafter, Portuguese ships brought exquisite commodities from China and all parts

*Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis


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of Asia to Europe, as well as detailed information about Chinese civilization, which created unprecedented curiosity about the Other. Concerning intercultural dialogue between East and West from the sixteenth century onwards, the material culture (that is, the artistic and ethno-anthropological objects that represent Chinese cultural identity, as well as the information that provided knowledge about all the characteristics that define the singularity of the Chinese), became the principal means by which Europeans created an image of the Middle Kingdom. Combining the qualities of the material culture1 and descriptive accounts provided by merchants, missionaries and travellers, the Europeans visualized China as a sophisticated culture and probably as the most advanced Asian civilization, although that image was often imprecise and imaginary. The establishment of Portuguese colonial rule in Macau in the midsixteenth century, which lasted for more than 400 years, was crucial for the cultural dialogue between China and Portugal, with significant repercussions not only for the emergence of a distinctive cultural identity in Macau, but also for the mutual perception of both nations. Throughout this long period, Macau was, and still is, simultaneously a cultural boundary between the regional culture of Macau and Mainland China, and a bridge for cultural encounters between Portugal and China. The history of these cultural and artistic encounters reverberates in the important collections of Chinese art and material culture extant in Portuguese museums, most of them acquired between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and also contributes to a fuller understanding of China and the history of the Portuguese in the Far East. The idea of a museum is founded on the preservation of collective memories, the construction of identities, and ongoing education based on the various aspects represented in its collections. Furthermore, the institution of a museum depends on the collectors’ motivations for acquiring objects and the cultural policies established by, for example, a government or board of trustees. As such, collections of Chinese material culture in Portuguese museums, as well as museum practices in the planning of exhibitions, play a critical role in how China and Chinese culture are regarded by the Portuguese public. Most collections of Chinese art and material culture held in Portuguese museums and private collections are made up of objects deriving from the Catholic missions and trade routes initially controlled by the Portuguese between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the British, Dutch, French, and Danish East India Companies were formed and began trading with Asia. Therefore, in general, collections in Portuguese museums comprise porcelains2 from the Ming and Qing dynasties but seldom ceramics from the Neolithic to Yuan dynasty, like ancient earthenware from the Han and Tang dynasties,3 or the various types of


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Figure 1. Display of Chinese ceramics, Museu do Oriente, 2013.

Song dynasty celadon, and only one or two examples of the so-called ‘five great wares’ of Song ceramics, such as those acquired by the Orient Museum in the 1990s (Figure 1). Furniture is another important component of Portuguese collections – predominantly cabinets, writing desks, and the so-called Coromandel folding screens, coated in black and/ or red lacquer, carved or plain, and often decorated with gold and silver (Figure 2). Also, the numerous paintings and engravings from the period during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries known as ‘China Trade’ present traditional cityscapes of Canton, or the continuous narrative of distinctive Chinese traditions, such as the preparation of tea, silk, porcelain and other commodities exported to and appreciated in the West. Finally, among these pieces it is also worth mentioning the large number of objects made under the Catholic missions and used for personal prayer or as liturgical furnishings for mass, such as ivory figurines, silk liturgical vestments, quilts and paraments, and the altar crosses, crucifixes and monstrances usually made of silver. Apart from these collections, we must consider the valuable collection acquired by the Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha, who lived and worked in Macau for the last 30 years of his life, between 1894 and 1926. On his arrival in Macau, he was fascinated by Chinese culture, becoming a connoisseur of Chinese art and poetry and a passionate collector of Chinese painting and calligraphy (from the Song to the Qing dynasties), cloisonné, porcelain, embroidery, and bronzes (from the Ming and Qing periods), and Chinese scholar objects, which he donated to the Portuguese government in 1915 (first donation) for installation in the National Art Museum (today’s National Museum of Ancient Art). Despite Pessanha’s


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Figure 2. Chinese Coromandel screen depicting the Portuguese, Hunan Province, Qing dynasty (1644–1911) Kangxi Period (1662–1722), wood and polychrome lacquer, H: 85.5 cm, W: 158.5 cm, Inv. FMA 305, Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida. © Pedro Moura.

pioneering aesthetic awareness of the ‘three perfections’ (painting, calli‐ graphy and poetry) and great mastery of the Chinese fine arts, José de Figueiredo, director of the National Art Museum in Portugal, stated in 1924 that the collection was unworthy of exhibition and should be kept in storage. Furthermore, two years later, when the collection was offered to the Museum of Ethnology, it was immediately turned down. Disappointed with this decision, in 1926 Pessanha left a will stating that the rest of his private collection (second donation) should join his first donation and be subsequently moved to the Machado Castro Museum in his hometown of Coimbra. Interestingly, in 1928, after the collection had been installed in Coimbra, the Portuguese Commission for the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville expressed the wish to use the collection to represent the Portuguese province (colony) of Macau, as part of the Portuguese Colonial Empire. The ‘art collection’ was to be exhibited in a Chinese Pavilion built in Macau, side by side with other ‘products and showcases of the same colony’ (Figure 3) (Ribeiro 2002: 150–97). Only in 2008, with the opening of the Orient Museum (Museu do Oriente) in Lisbon, did the artistic and cultural value of Pessanha’s Chinese collection become known and find a permanent exhibition space, based on a long-term loan agreement with the Machado Castro Museum.


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Figure 3. Pavilion of Macau, Seville, 1929.

As we can see, the profile of Chinese collections in Portuguese museums may be described in relation to two different circumstances that define how the public envisions China. On the one hand, objects collected in the context of the Portuguese presence in Macau, those derived from the trade routes in the China Sea, and the large number of liturgical furnishings for the Catholic missions in several Chinese provinces embody the construction of an ‘Oriental utopia by the Portuguese Colonial Empire’4 (Pereira 2008: 25) and promote, in a certain way, the cultural hegemony of Western civilization. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Pessanha’s Chinese art collection, rarely seen in Portuguese collections, stands as a testament to the remarkable mastery of Chinese fine arts. However, between the 1920s and the 1970s, the lack of knowl‐ edge of Chinese aesthetics and the history of Chinese art prevented a full understanding of their relevance and thus the paintings, calligraphy, carvings and cloisonné collected by Pessanha were envisioned and exhibited during this period as ethnographic and colonial material from the Portuguese province of Macau in China. Portuguese perceptions of Chinese culture during the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries were based on several factors. First, the political administration of the Territory of Macau, which lasted until the transfer of sovereignty in 1999, always remained in the Portuguese


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imaginary as the last colony (province) of the former Portuguese colonial empire. Second, the permanent celebration of the Portuguese overseas empire, continued and reinforced during the dictatorship that lasted for more than 40 years (1933–1974), significantly contributed to clouding Portuguese understanding of Chinese art and culture. However, in 1987 these perceptions began to change after the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau, also known as the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration, which established the terms and conditions for the transfer of sovereignty of Macau to the People’s Republic of China. This treaty introduced a series of political measures to ensure the preservation of Macau’s cultural identity, and simultaneously developed a set of initiatives to enhance the historical and cultural ties between China and Portugal. As such, Macau became the stage for mutual understanding, strengthened by the efforts of the Lisbon-based Missão de Macau in the planning of museums in Macau, and the establishment in the Portuguese capital of the Macau Scientific and Cultural Centre (CCCM) which opened in 1999 and hosted the collection of Chinese art gathered during the previous 20 years by António Sapage, a Macanese-born private collector. Moreover, the Orient Foundation (Fundação Oriente), established on 18 March 1988, was committed to fostering cultural, educational, artistic, scientific and philanthropic activities in Portugal and Macau. Among its many cultural initiatives, the Orient Foundation embarked on a systematic and continuous policy of acquisition, international market consultancy projects and a search for collectors who might be interested in donating their collections to a future Orient Museum in Lisbon. In 1999, French sinologist Jacques Pimpaneau donated nearly 10,000 objects, which had belonged to the Association du Musée Kwok On in Paris, to the Orient Foundation. This collection, also known as the Kwok On Collection, comprises Asian folk art and popular material culture from a geographic area stretching from Turkey to Japan, but more particularly China. This collection presents visiting audiences with a global perspective on Chinese arts and cultural heterogeneity through folk art and popular culture, conveyed by the visual and performance arts from regional cultures.

A journey to the unseen face of China: folk art and popular culture in the Orient Museum The exhibition of cultures, particularly through the display of folk art, demands of the curator an extraordinary knowledge of cultural context, in which religious beliefs, visual and artistic traditions, use of technology and language base assume critical roles in the definition of cultural identity. When material culture is displayed in different contexts, both in time and place, significant knowledge and power might be lost. Religious and ritual


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materials lose their power because they no longer serve devotional purposes or perform part of a ritual to ensure the welfare of the community. In the same way, performance costumes, puppets and worn accessories and adornments lose their function when removed from the audience of a play. However, they retain their potential educational function as transmitters of traditional knowledge, through the preservation of intangible heritage connected with folk art and material culture. The challenge for the curator is to ensure a balance between material conservation of the objects, either in storage or on display, and the preservation of intangible heritage; that is, bringing to light the technical skills and traditional knowledge contained within the objects, especially when they are displayed in another cultural environment. Through these two features objects demonstrate the cultural identity of a regional culture, and the importance that this regional culture has in a global context. The collection of Chinese folk art and popular culture held by the Orient Museum presents audiences with a unique interpretation and display of distinctive artistic and religious traditions, which represents a map of regional cultures and demonstrates the cultural heterogeneity of Greater China. The collection was initiated by Kwok On, a Chinese national from Hong Kong who had a passion for Cantonese opera and the performance arts in general. Not only did he collect all materials associated with Cantonese opera, including costumes, makeup, hats, helmets and musical instruments, but he also used them to perform with his friends (Pimpaneau 2008: 95). He also collected traditional wooden carved puppets used to perform operas in temple festivals to honour the gods. In the early 1970s, Kwok On met Jacques Pimpaneau, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a special interest in Chinese folk traditions, to whom he donated his collection with the aim of establishing a university museum in Paris. Meanwhile, the collection, with its focus on performance arts and ritual objects, grew significantly – not only featuring different regional cultures within China, but also embracing all other Asian cultures. Supported by the City of Paris, the Association du Musée Kwok On leased a building which hosted several exhibitions of Asian performance arts. However, plans to establish a museum in France were thwarted when the Bibliothèque Nationale de France rejected the collection, stating that it was outside the library’s remit due to its typological bias. Finally, in 1999 Jacques Pimpaneau decided to donate a collection of nearly 10,000 objects to the Orient Foundation, with the aim of expanding the collection of the future Orient Museum in Lisbon. In the same year, and eight years before the Orient Museum’s inauguration, a major exhibition entitled Chinese Popular Religion was held in Lisbon. This included a selection of objects from the Kwok On Collection. For the first


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time, Portuguese audiences were confronted with a different perspective on Chinese culture, exclusively focused on popular beliefs, rituals, and above all gods and demons, represented not only in painting, sculpture, masks, embroidery, shadow puppets, prints and altars, but also in musical instruments, papercuts, patchworks and the ritual paraphernalia burnt at funerals (Pimpaneau, 2001). Since that date, exhibitions of this collection have been regularly organized and curated throughout Europe by Jacques Pimpaneau and his wife Sylvie Gonfond, several of which have only exhibited Chinese folk art (Pimpaneau, 1980; Pimpaneau et al 2006).5 Following the inauguration of the Orient Museum in May 2008, onetenth of the collection was placed on permanent display, in an area of around 1500 m2, through a programme of long-term rotating exhibitions encompassing all the arts and traditions of Asia. The theme of the first long-term exhibition was Gods of Asia, on display until 2013. In June 2013 a new long-term exhibition was opened to the public, displaying the tradition of Asian shadow theatre. As for Chinese folk art and popular culture, which forms one of the richest and most valuable sets of the collection, regional cultural identities are explored through their distinctive artistic traditions, rites, ceremonies, beliefs and festivals. The collection of folk art can be roughly divided in two groups according to material type and function: performing arts and ceremonial objects.6 Performing arts The performing arts embrace all forms of theatrical representation from the various regional styles of Chinese opera (Beijing, Canton, Sichuan, and the ritual operas of Nuoxi and Dixi, which are particularly popular in Southwest China), to shadow play and the many different types of puppet (rod, string, glove and wire). Chinese opera is one of the most popular forms of drama and theatrical representation, narrating stories and depicting characters from either mythological or historical repertoires. The Orient Museum’s collection has nearly 700 objects related to Chinese Opera. Among these objects are those relating to the world-renowned Beijing opera, recognized as intangible heritage by UNESCO (Figure 4); the Cantonese opera, very popular in Guangdong and Guanxi provinces, and also Macau and Hong Kong; the Sichuanese opera, which, although originally from Sichuan province, has a strong influence in Southwest China, namely Chengdu, Chongqing, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hubei and Taiwan; the Nuoxi opera, characterised by its unique features such as frightening masks, costumes and language derived from the Nuoji practice of exorcism (Pimpaneau 2011). Nuoxi opera is one of the most interesting examples of a sacred ritual appropriated by artistic performance, and has become popular in Anhui, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Guangxi, Yunnan, Hunan and Guizhou. Finally, exclusively from Guizhou, Dixi opera is only


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Figure 4. Costume for Zhang Fei, Beijing Opera, Sichuan Province, silk, Inv. 05/01C0019, Museu do Oriente. © Fundação Oriente/Hugo Maertens.

performed twice a year, once during the Spring Festival and a second time in the middle of the seventh lunar month during the harvest season (Figure 5). Costumes and masks depicting historical characters like the general Zhang Fei or the warlord Liu Bei of the late Eastern Han dynasty in plays like the Reed Marsh or Sweet Dew Temple are highlights of the collection, as well as those for other characters in famous plays like The Peony Pavilion or the Legend of the White Snake. In addition to costumes and masks, opera-related objects include make-up sets, papercuts with makeup models for opera masks, a large number of props, pieces of scenery and stage adornments, posters of scenes from the Chinese Opera, a large set of papercuts depicting Chinese Opera characters and porcelain from the Ming and Qing periods with painted scenes of the Chinese opera.


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Figure 5. Mask of a General, Dixi Theatre, Guizhou Province, polychrome wood, Inv. 07/C0042, Museu do Oriente. © Fundação Oriente/João Silveira Ramos.

Shadow play and puppetry has a long tradition in Chinese theatre, probably predating the use of human performers. Though originally made of paper, Chinese shadow puppets have traditionally been made of animal hide, as in many other Asian countries. Although famous myths tell of the ancestry of shadow puppetry as it originated in the Warring States Period, it became very popular during the Tang and the Song dynasties, covering many regions of China, and reached its height of popularity during the Qing dynasty (Chen 2007: 14–59). Regional styles in the making of shadow puppets vary, as seen in the colour, physical characteristics, design or techniques used to cut the figures. In the northern central region (Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Gansu provinces), puppets are characterised by a pointy nose profile and tall rounded forehead. Measuring around 30–35 cm tall, they are mostly made of cowhide. In Northeast China (Hubei and


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Liaoning provinces) puppets are traditionally made of donkey- and cowhide, measure 30–50 cm tall and are characterized by bold lines and a leaning profile. Puppets from the western region are unique – especially those from Chengdu, which are the largest in size and extremely elaborated, with removable accessories. Sichuanese puppets are very similar to those from the northern central regions. In the southern province of Yunnan, puppets could be made of water buffalo and puppeteers frequently painted them using a mixture of mineral pigments from Myanmar. In the central provinces, Hunan puppets are uniquely defined by the design of their profile. While most puppet traditions use a straight profile, Hunan puppets’ faces appear in three-quarter view, making both eyes visible. Instead of leather, Hunan puppets are made of cheaper materials including a mixture of paper, coloured translucent wax paper and coloured plastic. Finally, the distinctive south-eastern style (Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian and Taiwan) is characterized by the absence of cuts carved into the leather, which is entirely painted. The collection contains more than 3000 shadow puppets, mostly from Hebei, Henan, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Hunan, Jiangxi and Sichuan provinces in Mainland China, and a significant number of puppets from Taiwan. Among these are the so-called modern-style communist puppets made during and after the Cultural Revolution, which are stylistically distinctive, portraying cartoon-like proletarian characters of the Revolution as opposed to the historical and mythological figures of traditional theatre. These shadow puppets are made from a combination of animal hide and contemporary materials, such as pressure-sensitive tape and rigid transparent plastic (Falcão 2006: 309). Shadow puppets include articulated figures, real and imaginary animals, stage adornments, props and stage scenery (such as furniture, altars, screens and wall paintings), wagons, and occasionally one single shadow puppet depicting an entire scene. Large troupes of puppets were used to play the amazing tales of Mulian, one of Sakyamuni’s devoted disciples (Mulian Rescues His Mother, traditionally played in funeral ceremonies), the story of the war between the Shang and Zhou regimes (The Investiture of the Gods), the crime fiction featuring the famous Song dynasty Judge Bao (Cases of Judge Bao) (Figure 6) and the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Journey to the West). More than a stylistic geography of the shadow puppetry tradition in China, this collection constitutes an extraordinary example of the unity of Chinese literary tradition, contributing to its preservation through time and place; not only in the sense that many of the plays belong to the allencompassing Chinese collective memory, but also because these puppets are – or should be – the storytellers of Chinese culture and literature in a non-Chinese cultural context, particularly when exhibited in Western museums.


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Figure 6. Shadow puppets for the play Cases of Judge Bao, Henan Province, c. 1970, polychrome animal hyde, Inv. 02/01C0113–02/01C0122, Museu do Oriente. © Fundação Oriente/António Rento.

Ceremonial objects The Chinese folk art and popular culture collection is focused on a large array of ceremonial objects, including paintings, sculptures, altars, ritual costumes and masks, and many other adornments and accessories used to perform rituals in different regions. The distinctive characteristics of the regional festivals, ceremonies, religious practices and myths contributed to discrete cultural and artistic identities. Influenced by the Buddhist visual narrative introduced in China during the early Han dynasty, the Chinese painting tradition emerged as one with the privileged means to describe historical and mythological events. Beyond the ink-and-brush painting tradition, widely regarded as the highest form of artistic expression within Chinese fine arts, popular painting played a significant societal and religious role in the context of culturally specific rites and beliefs. Thus iconic and narrative popular paintings, engravings and papercuts have close links with traditional Chinese festivals, rural ceremonies and ancient rites devoted to popular deities as well as Buddhist and Taoist gods. Devotional altars for the Nuo ceremonies performed at festivals or to celebrate New Year and harvests also contained paintings, surviving as a combination of sacrificial rites and the popular painting of heterogeneous Chinese ethnicities in Guizhou, Jiangxi, Anhui and Yunnan. These altar paintings show the intertwining of beliefs from popular religion on the one hand and Daoism and Buddhism on the other, since many of the paintings depict Daoist and Buddhist tales and deities. One such example is a scroll painting from a Nuo altar in Guizhou depicting a scene from the folk novel Seven Daoist Masters (Figure 7), which tells the story of six men and one woman who face extreme hardship on a journey to


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Figure 7. Nuo painting representing the Seven Daoist Masters, Guizhou Province, c. 1970, painting on paper, Inv. 08/01C0002, Museu do Oriente. © Fundação Oriente/Rui Oliveira Lopes.

self-mastery and enlightenment. Another painting shows the harsh scenes of the Ten Courts of Hell overseen by the Yama kings. In this framework, it is also worth mentioning the famous Ansai peasant paintings and patchworks from Shaanxi province distinguished by their bright and vivid colours, naive figures and peasant themes. These contributed significantly to the notion of ‘peasant art’ developed by the Communist Party during the Great Leap Forward, when art teachers and students were sent to the country. As such, these paintings represent the idea of an alliance between peasants and workers, manual and intellectual work, moving towards an egalitarian society, with all contributing equally to the revolutionary cause (Sullivan 1996: 147–50). Another remarkable set of popular artworks included in the collection is formed by the Yao ceremonial paintings, dated 1868, depicting the


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Three Pure Ones and other Daoist deities, specifically used for exorcism, ancestral worship, healing or funeral rituals. As well as the pantheon of Eighteen Gods, depicted individually on each scroll, the set contains another painted scroll portraying a version of the myth of Pangu, whom the Miao and the Yao people worship as an ancestor (Alberts 2006: 44– 46. Again, in terms of cultural identity, these paintings are important examples of the interaction between local religious beliefs and the powerful traditions of Daoism and Buddhism. Thus, beyond their visual and ritual distinctiveness, the ceremonial paintings of the Yao people appear to be a branch of global mainstream Chinese Daoism. In addition to the aforementioned paintings, the collection includes a large number of altar paintings and prints representative of the harmony between Daoism, Buddhism and popular religion found throughout China from the autonomous regions in Northwest China to Taiwan. They depict the deities according to local beliefs and the popularity of specific gods or goddesses. The richness of the altar paintings and prints is complemented by the sets of objects used to perform funerary rites and displayed at altars and funeral parlours, including costumes and masks used by shamans, altar textiles (embroidery, curtains and pendants), banners and flags, papercuts, incense burners, bowls and small wooden sculptures for placing in niches in wooden altars (Figure 8). The array of ceremonial objects engenders the recreation of the performance of rites underlining the complexity and cultural heterogeneity of Chinese folk art and popular culture, while providing a visual experience of an ephemeral happening.

Figure 8. Daoist altar, Museu do Oriente, 2013.


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The uniqueness of this collection, combined with its complexity, makes it difficult to understand its cultural and aesthetic value, especially when such objects are removed from their original setting and displayed in another cultural environment. As already discussed, the way Chinese material culture is perceived in other cultural contexts establishes the criteria for museum display and the management of collections. Thus, the same object – let us take a shadow puppet as an example – could be exhibited in either a museum of art, a museum of ethnology, a museum of history or even in an encyclopaedic museum. Considering the cultural differences between East and West (or, to be more accurate, the worldview of the ‘West and the rest’), there are two questions to be addressed. How should Western museums exhibit non-Western material culture in its broadest sense? Secondly, how could the exhibition of non-Western material culture affect Western contemporary art? In this particular case, I am interested in discussions about the place of Chinese folk art and popular culture in Western museums and how this particular material culture presents, rather than an alternative or unconventional viewpoint, a wider perspective on Chinese art and culture.

Appropriate museology: exhibiting Chinese [folk] art and popular culture in another cultural context Appropriate museology is defined by Christina Kreps (2007: 23) as ‘an approach to museum development and training that adapts museum practices and strategies for cultural heritage preservation to local cultural contexts and socioeconomic conditions. It is a bottom-up, communitybased approach that combines local knowledge and resources with those of professional museum workers to better meet the needs and interests of a particular museum and its community’. The main argument is clearly based on the principles of appropriate technology, traditionally attributed to Mahatma Gandhi in his pursuit of India’s independence and selfsustainability. Kreps’ case study in Indonesia shows how museum practice should be adapted to the local cultural environment, technology and knowledge base, under very specific sociological and economic situations, for the better preservation of intangible cultural heritage. Based on the idea of cultural adjustment, what is proposed here is the employment of appropriate museology by Western museums when managing and displaying non-Western collections of art and material culture. In 2006, Peter Weibel and Hans Belting launched a programme entitled Global Art and the Museum at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, hoping to stimulate discussion on how globalization processes change the art scene and how contemporary art crosses geographic and cultural boundaries. It is a fact that contemporary art is increasingly diverse and spans a wider cultural geography. However, exhibitions of


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non-Western artists are seldom presented without reference to their cultural geography. In a recent study of Chinese contemporary art exhibitions in Europe, Franziska Koch (2013: 374-409) demonstrates the dominance of political strategy from both China and Europe and the way such strategy emphasizes experimental artistic positions that encourage audiences to perceive the stereotypes of ‘Chineseness’. In my view, this shows the strength that cultural and artistic stereotypes retain in the contemporary art world, significantly contributing to a deeper estrangement between fine and folk art, when in practice both these two categories should be considered as constituents of cultural identity. The museum is a place for intercultural dialogue and, in terms of the display of different cultural identities, it has the additional responsibility to develop practices and appropriate education programmes committed to the expansion of accurate and clear knowledge about the collections for different audiences, and ideally free from traces of cultural hegemony or stereotypical prejudice. From this viewpoint, I argue that exhibiting cultures in another cultural context, as in the Orient Museum in Lisbon, implies a combination of three perspectives, corresponding to three aspects of the same history. First, we must consider Chinese art traditionally made for imperial purposes, which exhibits conventional Chinese aesthetic standards, shaping national cultural identity. Jade objects and ritual bronzes from the Neolithic period to the Han dynasty, as well as various types of earthenware, ceramics and lacquer, which span the whole timeline of Chinese art history, are examples of production controlled by political power. Only the powerful elites could collect and include exquisite and luxurious objects in their tombs, in a limited number according to their status, or acquire them for their private collections. As for ceramics, the emperor controlled the kilns to prevent the export of the best quality ceramics, demonstrating the importance of the relationship that art and technology had with political power and cultural identity. During the thirteenth century, porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen became so important that the Yuan emperor, Kublai Khan, established an official agency, the Fouliang Porcelain Bureau, to control production. Later, during the Ming dynasty, Emperor Hongwu founded a porcelain factory in Jingdezhen, which continued to serve as the imperial kilns throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties (Vainker 2007: 239). Moreover, Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy, as visual and literary representations of Chinese cultural institutions, have always been considered both within China and worldwide as the finest of Chinese arts. Examples of such artworks are on display in the most renowned metropolitan museums in Europe and the USA, where they are normally admired for their aesthetic values (at least by museum curators) and exhibited as the essential core of Chinese art and culture. Second, there are the collections of Chinese art which crossed the oceans on board Portuguese ships or via the trade routes of the East India


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Companies. As mentioned above, Chinese export porcelain, the so-called Coromandel folding screens and writing desks, the ‘China Trade’ paintings and engravings, as well as all devotional objects used by Western missionaries, are very common in Western museums but, ironically, barely known in China, particularly those in the unique forms of porcelains made for the European market following European models. However, these collections of objects do not tell the history of China, but rather the history of the European presence in China, and how Europeans visualized China. Therefore, over many years Western museums promoted a view of global colonial empires and the great achievements of Western nations. Some still do. Besides this clouded perspective of China, which contributed to the misunderstanding of Chinese civilization based on cultural stereotypes, theoretically these objects should contribute to a mutual history and be exhibited not solely to demonstrate the power and extension of European colonial empires, but also to portray the cultural encounters between China and the West. Finally, although these inner and outer perspectives provide a clear idea of Chinese art and culture, there is a missing piece from the picture. The ‘third eye’, which provides perception beyond ordinary sight, is founded in the roots of cultural identity, meaning traditional knowledge perpetuated through folk art and popular culture. The distinctive and individual qualities of regional styles in Chinese folk art stand as individual parts of a greater whole, where the local necessarily plays an important role in the image of a (global) Greater China. This idea overlaps with the Confucian principle of governance expressed in the Analects: ‘When one rules by means of virtue (de) it is like the North Star – it dwells in its place and the other stars pay reverence to it’ (Analects I: 2, cit. from Eno, 2012). Despite regional and ethnic heterogeneity, this overarching cultural unity probably explains the continuity and preservation of Chinese cultural values over more than 5000 years, even after the Han Chinese were defeated and ruled by the Mongols, and later by the Manchus. One extraordinary example of multicultural unity under the governance of the emperor is shown in two album paintings depicting Yongzheng’s Amusements, held in the Palace Museum in Beijing. In these paintings, the Yongzheng emperor is depicted wearing different costumes, presenting himself as the sovereign of all Chinese peoples, independent of their religion, social status or ethnicity (Lopes 2009: 26–33). More recently, at the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, 56 young children, representing the 56 ethnic groups of modern China, donned their respective traditional costumes and marched side by side holding the flag of the People’s Republic of China while a nine-year-old girl performed Ode to the Motherland, composed by Wang Xin between 1950 and 1951. Furthermore, when Beijing and the Chinese nation were at the centre of the world stage during the first moments of this child’s appearance


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together with Chinese painting and calligraphy beamed onto a giant LED scroll, local culture was presented as a constituent of a greater whole. The main problem concerning the display of Chinese fine arts and folk art as a whole stems from the cultural specificity of ‘art’: ‘there is no common notion of art that necessarily applies to all societies around the world’ (Belting 2007: 16). Therefore, the traditional cultural hegemony of the West over non-Western cultures defines what is understood by art, while other cultures are defined and represented by material culture. This idea establishes the specific difference between art and artefact. As shown earlier in this paper, colonial experience clouded the way museums in the West displayed and valued Chinese art, including the highly appreciated arts of painting and calligraphy. Cultural differences between the West and the non-Western world, between art and artefact, resulted in an institutionalized dichotomy between art museums and ethnographic museums (Santos 2009: 164–176). However, even if non-Western art, either the core of fine arts or folk art and popular culture, does not fit the Western definition of art, the object preserves its structural identity, including its aesthetic criteria. The recognition of non-Western aesthetic values, beyond the framework of European colonialism, was the main argument for the French Modernists’ re-labelling of art primitif as art premier, to designate artistic production by so-called ‘traditional societies’ (Fur 2006). In 1918, Guillaume Apollinaire was a pioneer in suggesting that African sculptors should display their work in the Louvre side by side with great Western sculpture. D’ailleurs, certains chefs-d’œuvre de la sculpture nègre peuvent parfaitement être mis auprès de belles œuvres de sculpture européenne de bonne époque et je me souviens d’une tête africaine de la collection de M. Jacques Doucet qui soutient parfaitement la comparaison avec de belles pièces de la sculpture romane. (Giraudon 1993)

Throughout the twentieth century, many important personalities of the French cultural elite, such as Claude Levi-Strauss, André Malraux and Jacques Kerchache, pursued this idea of displaying exotic artworks, particularly from the former French colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific (Fur 2006). The debate on the controversy surrounding the display of ‘ethnographic art’ in Western museums is ongoing. In 1985, museum curators and directors of leading ethnographic and art museums in the Netherlands participated in a symposium organized by the Tropenmuseum to discuss the possibility of integrating collections. As expected, art museum professionals promptly rejected the idea of displaying ethnographic art alongside European artworks, arguing that ‘such art did not fit the criteria employed in [Western] contemporary art discourse’ (Shatanawi 2009: 368).


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In 1995, French President Jacques Chirac set up a commission to prepare for the integration of the so-called ‘primitive arts’ in the most important art museum in France, the Musée du Louvre. This commission, led by Jacques Friedmann, was responsible for reuniting the collections of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et Océanie (which opened to the public as the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 to display the diverse cultures and resources of the French colonial empire) with the collections of the Musée de l’Homme, creating a new museum, the Musée du quai Branly, jointly overseen by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Ministry of National Education, Research and Technology. Meanwhile, the commission was also charged with the preparation of a new wing for the Louvre, located in the Pavillon des Sessions, in which were installed 108 sculptures grouped in four geographical areas: Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Jacques Kerchache selected the sculptures for the exhibition, which opened in 2000. In 2006, he announced the inauguration of the Musée du quai Branly, featuring the ‘arts premiers’ of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, and styled as a place where cultures meet in dialogue (‘là où dialoguent les cultures’). In fact, among the near 3500 objects on display in the ‘Plateau des Collections’, which presents the dialogue between cultures, visitors are confronted with the lack of representation of Western culture and the absence of any kind of contemporary art. As such, the Musée du quai Branly is clearly an ethnographic museum that continues to represent the Western (pre)colonial worldview and cultural hegemony, instead of representing ‘other cultures’ on their own terms. As stressed by Hans Belting (2007), [T]he new museum is a thinly disguised art museum, disguised in that it conceals the former division between two types of museums. After its opening, the topography of memory was neatly distributed over distinct institutions in Paris. The new museum assembles the heritage of Africa and Oceania [and the Americas], and the Musée Guimet presents the arts of Asia. The Louvre owns those antiquities, including Egyptian, which the French regard as their own heritage, but the new Islamic department opens a window to a larger world.

Displaying Chinese collections in the Orient Museum The continuity of such museum practice shows the predominance of cultural and artistic stereotypes that cloud the way Western audiences view non-Western (folk) art and popular culture, based on the argument that these objects fall outside the criteria employed in contemporary, or Western, art discourse. However, the works of many European modern and contemporary artists demonstrate a profound intimacy with nonWestern visual culture placing themselves between tradition and contemporaneity. In the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto


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Antropofágico, a critique of European post-colonial hegemony, he outlines the concept of ‘anthropophagy’ (Netto 2004). Aesthetic anthropophagy can be defined as the process of acquiring the qualities of a ‘strange body’, that is, the artistic discourse of another cultural environment. Either acting as a place for representing non-Western arts and cultures, or for the exhibition of Western contemporary cultural and artistic anthropophagy, museums play a critical role in mutual understanding, establishing a network of cross-connections between tradition and contemporaneity and beyond cultural geography. Therefore, a bridge between tradition and a contemporary worldview, as well as between different cultural geographies, is a necessary requirement for an all-encompassing visual culture. As stated above, in the framework of intercultural dialogue through the exhibition of cultures, the museum has the additional responsibility to develop practices and education activities committed to the expansion of accurate knowledge about the objects on display, and should aspire to be free from any suggestion of cultural assumptions and stereotypical prejudice. However, even if a museum was established with a specific purpose, directors and curators have different ideas about how to exhibit their collections, showing varying attitudes and orientations toward their meaning, cultural context and artistic significance. As Ivan Karp (1991: 11–12) has stated, [A]ll exhibitions are inevitably organized on the basis of assumptions about the intentions of the object’s producers, the cultural skills and qualifications of the audience, the claims to authoritativeness made by exhibition and the judgements of the aesthetic merit or authenticity of the objects or settings exhibited.

Moreover, the type of museum can play a critical role in how collections are to be exhibited and presented in another cultural context. For instance, art museums tend to highlight the aesthetic value of the objects, while cultural-history museums, including encyclopaedic, history, anthropology and ethnography museums, explore knowledge about the cultural and historical context of the objects. Curators of non-Western collections in Western museums can choose to remove cultural objects from their original context and present them in an alternative discourse, emphasizing or downplaying artistic, anthropological, ethnographic or technological values. Alternatively, curators can organize exhibitions in liaison with the community or cultural representatives, especially when presenting ethnoanthropological objects, which involve local beliefs and traditions. At this point, the key question is: How should the Chinese collections of the Orient Museum be exhibited? Opened to the public in 2008, the Orient Museum, part of the Orient Foundation, is committed to the promotion of distinctive Asian cultures and historical encounters between East and West, conveyed through the presence of the Portuguese in Asia, from the sixteenth century to the present day. The museum collections comprise


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objects from across Asia, representing different cultures from that region, together with the flow of art, artefacts, goods, beliefs and knowledge, mainly between the East and the West. The Chinese collections of the Orient Museum cover art, anthropology, archaeology, decorative arts, applied arts, history and religion. Considering the aim of the Orient Museum as well as the cultural-historical nature of its collections, I suggest that the Chinese permanent collections should be organized on the basis of three complementary cultural and historical constituents: regional cultures, national identity, and global interactions. These three cultural and historical constituents present a global perspective on China, displaying objects using their own discourse, value and authenticity, avoiding cultural assumptions, such as emphasis on the Portuguese presence in China, perpetuating the controversy about displaying ‘ethnographic art’ in Western museums, or identifying the artistic value of the objects against the cultural context from which they derive. The Orient Museum has two large exhibition galleries for permanent collections on the first and second floors. These are divided into three sections: a central hall containing large display cases, flanked by two longitudinal and symmetrical wings in an east–west position. In the central hall, which forms the only entrance to the galleries, should be exhibited the material culture representative of the regional cultures, presenting to visitors the cultural heterogeneity of Chinese civilization through the exhibition of popular painting, ritual painting used in local ceremonies, altars, ritual paraphernalia, costumes, masks, theatre puppets, and opera-related objects from the various regions and styles across China. This section is presented as a visual narrative of the various traditions and customs between different provinces, demonstrating the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity of the Chinese people as represented in music, performance arts, rituals and spiritual beliefs. In the east wing should be exhibited objects valued as national cultural relics, such as brush and ink paintings and calligraphy, ritual bronzes, various types of ceramics (from Neolithic earthenware to the exquisite and sophisticated Song dynasty celadons and porcelains), Chinese lacquers, ancient Chinese stone and bronze sculpture, tapestry and embroidery, and ‘precious objects from the scholar’s studio’, including carvings, brushes and brush holders, palettes and teapots. These objects have a unique historical, cultural and artistic significance, acknowledged as the most valuable relics of Chinese history and culture. They are symbols of Chinese cultural identity and political authority, representing cultural institutions such as political organization, philosophy and religion (ancient ritual practices and ancestor worship), language and script, aesthetics, literati culture and the values of Chinese collective memory. These artefacts and cultural products tell us about the basic values and assumptions, behavioural norms and conventions, beliefs and attitudes shared by the Chinese.


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The west wing should display the collections of objects produced in the context of intercultural dialogue between China and other nations, representing the flow of art, artefacts, goods, beliefs and knowledge, from the Silk Road to the ‘China Trade’, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This collection comprises porcelains exported to Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe and Japan; the cabinets, writing desks and the so-called Coromandel folding screens, coated in black and/or red lacquer brought to Europe in the ships of the East India Companies; objects made under the Catholic missions and used for personal prayer or as liturgical furnishings for mass, and the numerous paintings and engravings from the period known as ‘China Trade’, presenting traditional cityscapes of Canton, or the continuous narrative of Chinese daily life. These objects present the history of global interactions between China and the world, the impact of Chinese culture beyond its boundaries and the way in which China has been perceived by other cultures. The combination of these three perspectives on Chinese culture presents a global perspective on its historical, artistic and anthropological values. By exhibiting them on the same level, side by side, without any hierarchy of importance, it is possible to avoid the cultural assumptions of the curators or museum directors. Exhibiting Chinese art and popular culture in another cultural context should not be a process of displacement or cultural disarticulation, but a process of adaptation and cultural adjustment based on its original discourse, thereby avoiding others’ cultural assumptions. To present a global perspective on a specific culture is to balance the value of things between the gaze of the one and the discourse of the Other, turning the museum into a place for intercultural dialogue.

Funding This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, [FCT/ SFRH/BPD/79355/2011].

Notes 1. The term ‘material culture’, developed during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, traditionally referred to the relationship between artefacts and their social environment (time and place). In my opinion, today, its meaning is wider also including the material constituent of cultural heritage, which includes art, architecture, manuscripts and other objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest. Thus material culture does not imply a dichotomy between art and artefact.


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2. Mainly Chinese export porcelain, which includes a wide range of wares, such as the first commissions of blue and white porcelain from the Ming dynasty, particularly from the Zhengde, Jiajing and Wanli periods. Also very popular among Portuguese museums and private collectors is armorial porcelain, decorated with coats of arms, as well as famille verte, noire, jaune and rose from the Kangxi and Qianlong periods, which frequently depicted Christian themes, with forms based on European ceramics. White porcelain figurines from the Dehua kilns in Fujian province, known as Blanc de Chine, occasionally appear on display in Portuguese museums in the context of the Catholic missions in China and Japan. 3. It is worth mentioning the small but significant group of objects from this period collected by António Medeiros de Almeida (a Portuguese businessman) during and after World War II, whose taste was unconventional compared to contemporary Portuguese collecting trends. However, his collection was only placed on public display when his converted House-Museum opened in 2001. 4. An idea originally presented by Fernando António Baptista Pereira for the Orient Museum’s concept and programme (Pereira 2008: 25). 5. In 2003 in association with the Orient Foundation, the Fundació ‘la Caixa’ produced an exhibition in Barcelona entitled Viatge al món de les ombres (Journey to the World of Shadows) featuring shadow puppetry traditions from India, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia, China and Turkey. Two years later, the two institutions produced another exhibition, this time limited to shadows and puppets from China, entitled Herois i déus:. El teatre d’ombres i de titelles a la Xina (Heroes and Gods: The Theatre of Shadows and Puppets from China). In 2005, in collaboration with CESMO in Turin, the Orient Foundation organized an exhibition of popular prints illustrating Chinese New Year and religious subject matter from different provinces. Finally, in 2006 in cooperation with the Centre Culturel Abbaye de Daoulas, the Orient Foundation organized an exhibition of Asian masks in France entitled Visages des dieux, visages des hommes: Masques d’Asie (Faces of Gods, Faces of Men: Masks of Asia). 6. Many objects in the Kwok On Collection, like the near 200 Chinese propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution, are not included in this study as they were not considered to be representative of regional cultures.

Notes on contributor Rui Oliveira Lopes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, (Foundation for Science and Technology) at the Artistic Studies Research Centre, Faculty of Fine Arts - University of Lisbon, received his PhD (suma cum laude) in the History of Art in 2011 from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, completing a dissertation on the confluence of Christian art in India, China and Japan between the 16th and the 18th centuries. His research is focused on the visual aspects of the sacred narratives in the arts of the Asian civilizations, the artistic and cultural interactions between Asia and Europe, the museum as a place for

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intercultural dialogue, and the role of western museums in promoting and protecting Asian (in)tangible cultural heritage. Currently, he is coordinator of the research project Art in a Global Perspective at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon.


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