“ . . . there was nothing ‘gentle’ . . . ”
“The title is meant ironically,” curator Andrew Nicholls tells me about A Gentle Misinterpretation, drawn from a Robert Copeland comment on Chinoiserie – the Western appropriation of Asian aesthetics. “Copeland was talking about the early days of Britain’s commercial ceramics industry, and there was nothing ‘gentle’ about their mimicking of Chinese aesthetics. Designs such as the iconic Willow pattern (which many people still assume is an authentic Chinese pattern) were created in England to steal the market away from China, which had dominated global ceramics production for over a millennium.”
A Gentle Misinterpretation is the culmination of a seven-year research and development project, including Nicholls’ residencies at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. But, as Nicholls explains, its genesis can be traced to 2004: “when I undertook my first international residency, at the Spode China factory in the UK (investigating their ongoing use of colonial imagery from the eighteenth century)” and a weekend visit to the Royal Pavilion, built by George IV in the Chinoiserie style.
Tarryn Gill, Surely this must be death, 2022, installation: curtain, fabric sculpture, and vintage slippers, dimensions variable. Photograph: Miles Noel Photography. Courtesy the artist, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney and Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia
“The Pavilion is the world’s most extravagant and intact version of the style in architectural and interior design, and I still vividly remember walking from the comparatively plain Entrance Hall into the Long Gallery, which has hand-painted pink bamboo-motif wall murals, Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and porcelain sculptures of Chinese men whose heads nod up and down . . . it was all so breathtakingly opulent and so outrageously awkward in its cultural insensitivity.”
Nicholls both curates and exhibits here, presenting a series of porcelain objects, including recycled and repurposed vintage dinnerware adorned with the Willow pattern, Britain’s most enduring example of Chinoiserie. And while the show benefits from the depth of Nicholls’ research and individual practice, this, like the style itself, is nuanced by a dazzling range of other individual and group interpretations and benefits from a long curatorial gestation. “It’s quite an epic and self-indulgent project,” Nicholls says, “thirteen artists, a set painter, a baroque ensemble, Chinese musicians, and more than ninety artworks – as befits its opulent subject matter.”
Tanija and Graham Carr, Chinoiserie Group, 2017–2022, leather, stained finish, 170 × 60 × 70cm. Photograph: Victor France. Courtesy the artists and Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia
Found here are struggles for sense from colonialist chapters that are personal but also profoundly universal. Some of the art interprets styles across history through surprisingly intimate, even sublime, objects, which appear alongside interpretations that contrast and bring richness to this history, some even with Shakespearean proportions. Thai–Australian Nathan Beard’s porcelain vases, for instance, cast by Jingdezhen artisans and featuring hand-painting by cobalt master Yu Xuan that reinterpret scenes from the Kachin region of Myanmar (a country bordering China and Thailand) can be experienced alongside Abdul Abdullah’s video work Dispossession, depicting a scene from The Tempest shot in the Royal Pavilion’s Music Room.
Abdullah appears as slave Caliban in this video work – a portrayal tied to the artist’s recent self-portraits – and Brighton-based actress Sidonie Bond is Miranda, his oppressor; it stands as just one example of how this exhibition extends beyond ceramics to consider the implications of other trades, such as in slaves and opium.
Andrew Nicholls and Jingdezhen artisans, Untitled (Cobalt Skull #1), hand-painted cobalt on porcelain, dimensions variable. Cobalt painting by Yu Xuan, 2016. Photograph: Bewley Shaylor. Courtesy the artists and Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia
“There is an element of truth-telling to this project,” Nicholls tells me. And, to my mind, the universality of this truth comes via a critical eye to the past that resists being confined to it; a knowingness of the ripple-power of certain styles and patterns into the present is necessary, in fact – such as with Willow, which adorns many of our tables, this author’s included. Even George IV, who Nicholls describes “as emblematic of the voracious appetite of the British Empire to dominate global resources,” cannot, in truth, be confined to the past; and neither can Chinoiserie and “what it has to say about those moments when different cultures butt up against and scrutinise each other.”
Chinoiserie emerged during an era of “feverishly Empire-building at any cost,” and while for some of us it might seem more comfortable to speak in terms of a legacy of Chinoiserie in the aftermath of Empire, this show poses a reminder – sometimes gentle, sometimes emoted more strongly, even polemically – that its impact is still with us and its locations of origin and export are more dispersed and keenly, globally felt; even in the now, by Australia and its artists. In Nicholls’ words: Chinoiserie “feels particularly relevant in Australia at the moment as we try to desperately heal our relationship with China, which is very much an economic and political superpower again, as it was in the eighteenth century.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is an art critic, author and cultural scholar based in Far North Queensland.
Fremantle Arts Centre
13 August to 23 October 2022
Western Australia
