On The Faience Of Your Eyes / 你 的 瓷 色 雙 眼
19. May - 30. July 2022
LIUSA WANG
77 rue des Archives, 75003 Paris
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Continuing Chihying's long-term critical research into museums and collections, On the Faience of Your Eyes attempts to explore how the views of the others are shaped by displays and the creation of systemised knowledge, by reviewing two historical exhibitions of Asian artefacts exhibited in Western museums. The first exhibition, titled "Chinese Art" (Chinesische Kunst) was held in 1929 at the Berlin Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste), located on the Pariser Platz in the capital of Germany. More than 1,000 exhibits were on display over a period of more than two months. This was the first time Chinese artefacts were displayed in Europe on such a grand scale. The second exhibition began at the Château de Fontainebleau in France in the mid-19th century, combining art from China, Siam, Japan, Korea and Tibet, which is still going on today. Whether the exhibits were acquired through war looting, gifts or acquisitions, after the Western collectors combine their imaginations and appropriation directly into these objects, the two exhibitions clearly reflect the image of the others that the viewers are pursuing. A famous poem from Victor Hugo, Vase de Chine, is used as inspiration for the exhibition's title On The Faience Of Your Eyes. Through this French writer's poetic personification of exotic artefacts from the East, the installations in this exhibition examine the orientalist gaze generated by colonialism and violence.
The title Phantasmagoria is taken from an article published in the German art journal Ostasiatische Zeitschrift by British writer Francis Ayscough following a visit to the exhibition Chinesische Kunst at the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1929. In this short experimental essay, the author imagines that these collections from Asia are talking and singing at midnight to each other. Using music generating algorithms, The Phantasmagoria constructs the scene of a singing collection by assembling subjective descriptions from the essay. The video was projected using an old technique called "Phantasmagoria", which was widely used before cinema was invented.
“The Chinese Museum” at the Palace of Fontainebleau was established in 1867. Most of the collections were plundered by the British and French forces during the Opium War. In view of this event, these collections can be constructed in three distinct viewing experiences: the first is the moment right before the foreign invasion when the Western "Perspective Linéaire" technique was introduced to the Qing imperial court, which became an important exchange between East and West in visual history. As part of the post-invasion period, the second moment, Chinese artefacts were looted and brought to Europe, some of which were remodelled by members of the French court by incorporating Western artistic styles. This "Pastische" re-creation strips these objects of their original sculptural functions and enshrouds them with a distinctive hegemonic meaning. In the early morning of March 1, 2015, a theft incident happened again in the Chinese Museum at Fontainebleau, which marked the third moment in the contemporary context of these cultural objects. The display of colonial looted items is undergoing an important change under the current political and economic climate, highlighting the fundamental ideological problems of Western museums displaying the collections relate to colonialism. It also implies the involvement of huge political forces and the trading network under the table. Using storytelling as a medium, the sound installation The Vitrine transforms the exhibition site into a crime scene of a stolen museum, which not only provides audiences with a starting point to review the problematic Asian collection in Western institutions, but also responds to the critic Ariella Azoulay and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung's concept of “museums as crime scenes”.
The Shelf depicts the shadows of 15 porcelain vases on display at the Palace of Fontainebleau. The cartoon-
like image of the eyes on the object comes from the exhibition poster of the Chinesische Kunst at Berlin
Academy of Arts in 1929. The poster emphasises the shape of the exhibit's eyes, making the object appear alive. This design may have inspired Francis Ayscough to anthropomorphize the collection in his essay
Phantasmagoria. The irregular display shelf used to support the vases in the museum is also highlighted by the
irregular frames. As with Vitrine, the two works aim to present the technique of showing and constructing the
ideologies of the other.
A lion and a marmoset fell in love. However, the size of the lion was too big, so the lion prayed to the Buddha for help. Buddha decided to turn it into the size of a marmoset and made it become the ancestor of pekingeses. The name of this work is derived from a pekingese which was plundered to the West by the British-French alliance after the Opium War. The dog’s real name was nowhere to find; nevertheless, the British royal family gave it a new name, Looty, which precisely reflected its contradictory political roles: being a plundered loot and a survivor in a disaster at the same time. The work The Looty turns the image of Looty into a non-fungible token for remembering this event and also rethinking how new technology can change the forms of collections and visual narrative
communication.
Installation view at the LIUSA WANG in Paris, France, 2022
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