Japan and design in early Chinese export art

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by KEE IL CHOI, Jr.

The European market for lacquerwares generated similar interchanges among the Asian producers. Although Europeans overwhelmingly identified Japan with the highest quality lacquer, as a practical matter Japan was unable to sustain a monopoly in the medium much beyond the middle of the century. Surely sensing an economic opportunity, the Chinese began to produce both carved and painted lacquerwares to capitalize on the Europeans' apparently insatiable demand. [16] One theory suggests, in fact, that Dutch clients based in Nagasaki ordered the Coromandel screens with Namban imagery from China because such objects could be made more cheaply there than in Japan. [17]

Interestingly, among the four Chinese objects we have been discussing, the food box decorated in famille verte enamels provides additional evidence of both the variety of Namban imagery available to the Chinese and of the truly international aspect of the inter-Asian trade of the time. The fact that it differs from the screens and the beaker vase in including two different ships, one European and the other Chinese, attests to a slightly different design source. Through the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch had officially begun trade relations with Japan in 1609, and in 1641 were granted exclusive privileges, along with the Chinese, to trade in Nagasaki, after persuading the Japanese of their desire only to trade, and not to spread Christianity. A painted byobu of the early eighteenth century depicts a similar pairing of a square-rigged Dutch merchantman under full sale with a Chinese junk, this one at a mooring (Pl. XII). [18] A Japanese woodblock-printed map of Naga saki harbor dating to 1680 also shows the two principal types of ships at anchor in the harbor at the time--junks and Dutch merchantmen. [19] Thus the decorator of the food box must have consulted a source that included the different foreign ships, but otherwise organized the scene in much the same way as on the Coromandel screens. Again, the fluid nature of the inter-Asia trade at this time would have permitted such a design to make its way from Japan to China.

Dating as it does to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, the group of four Chinese objects under consideration represents an intriguing survival that is at once rooted in the artistic traditions and trade conditions of one era and is a harbinger of those of another. The makers of the screens not only adopted a Japanese format and a

Japanese medium, they also appropriated specialized Namban imagery to amuse and attract sophisticated clients, be they domestic or foreign. Subsequently Chinese porcelain painters, with their ability to bring a subject to a larger audience through mass production, adopted the imagery of the screens, and, in the case of the food box, even referred to the international character of the inter-Asian export market. The resourcefulness and innovation of these professional artisans attests to the vigor and receptiveness of the Chinese marketplace for art at the time. The artistic strategies they employed would serve both them and their European clientele well in the eighteenth century, especially after direct trade brought about direct artistic exchange, allowing export art to flourish as a hybrid tradition that amalgamated formats, mediums, and styles into a distinctive whole.