BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: Chinamania

DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: Chinamania:

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Description of Pictures: Chinamania
July 9, 2016 – June 4, 2017
Chinamania, the craze for Chinese blue-and-white ceramics, swept London in the nineteenth century and still endures in the West. Contemporary artist Walter McConnell, inspired by his travels in China and the kilns as Jindgzhen, interrogates this phenomenon through his reinstallation of Kangxi porcelains similar to those originally displayed in the Peacock Room. The show also includes two monumental ceramic stupas from McConnell’s The Theory of Everything series.

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[1] CHINAM_170412_001.JPG	[2] CHINAM_170412_005.JPG	[3] CHINAM_170412_009.JPG
[4] CHINAM_170412_013.JPG	[5] CHINAM_170412_015.JPG	[6] CHINAM_170412_017.JPG
[7] CHINAM_170412_020.JPG	[8] CHINAM_170412_024.JPG	[9] CHINAM_170412_027.JPG
[10] CHINAM_170412_033.JPG	[11] CHINAM_170412_036.JPG	[12] CHINAM_170412_038.JPG
[13] CHINAM_170412_041.JPG	[14] CHINAM_170412_044.JPG	[15] CHINAM_170412_046.JPG
[16] CHINAM_170412_050.JPG	[17] CHINAM_170412_061.JPG	[18] CHINAM_170412_065.JPG
[19] CHINAM_170412_067.JPG	[20] CHINAM_170412_070.JPG	[21] CHINAM_170412_072.JPG
[22] CHINAM_170412_075.JPG	[23] CHINAM_170412_077.JPG	[24] CHINAM_170412_080.JPG
[25] CHINAM_170412_084.JPG	[26] CHINAM_170412_086.JPG	[27] CHINAM_170412_089.JPG
[28] CHINAM_170412_092.JPG	[29] CHINAM_170412_095.JPG	[30] CHINAM_170412_097.JPG
[31] CHINAM_170412_099.JPG	[32] CHINAM_170412_101.JPG	[33] CHINAM_170412_105.JPG
[34] CHINAM_170412_107.JPG	[35] CHINAM_170412_109.JPG	[36] CHINAM_170412_110.JPG
[37] CHINAM_170412_112.JPG	[38] CHINAM_170412_114.JPG	[39] CHINAM_170412_117.JPG
[40] CHINAM_170412_123.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. CHINAM_170412_001.JPG: Chinamania A mania for Chinese blue-and-white porcelain swept through London in the 1870s as a new generation of artists and collectors "rediscovered" imported wares from Asia. Foremost among them was American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler. For him, porcelain was a source of serious aesthetic inspiration. For British shoppers, however, Chinese ceramics signified status and good taste. Cultural commentators of the time both embraced and poked fun at the porcelain craze. Illustrator George du Maurier parodied the fad in a series of cartoons for Punch magazine that documented what he mockingly called "Chinamania." More than a hundred fifty years later, American artist Walter McConnell explores Chinamania in our own time. In this exhibition, he juxtaposes two monumental porcelain sculptures, which he terms stupas, with export wares from China's Kangxi period (1662–1722). Those blue-and-white ceramics are similar to those that once filled the shelves of Whistler's Peacock Room in London. These historical porcelains also inspired McConnell to create a new work based on 3D-printed replicas. His interest in replication and in the serialized mass production of ceramic forms began after he visited China more than a decade ago. The large kilns and busy factories at Jingdezhen prompted McConnell to look at China as an enduring resource for ceramic production. Chinamania occupies the same gallery space as Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre, a contemporary installation that reimagines the Peacock Room as a resplendent ruin, a monument of excess. Originally a dining room in a London mansion, the Peacock Room was designed in 1875 to showcase more than three hundred pieces of Chinese blue and white porcelain belonging to the shipping tycoon Frederick Leyland. After museum founder Charles Lang Freer purchased the room in 1904 and shipped it to the United States, he filled its shelves with rough-textured, subtly glazed ceremics from all over Asia. Inspired by Freer's ceramics collection, Waterston painted scores of vessels and arranged them on the buckling shelves of Filthy Lucre. These oozing, misshapen ceramics convey a sense of unsustainable luxury and excess. They also echo McConnell's interest in the interplay of creativity, the mass production of aesthetic objects, and the powerful forces of materialism and conspicuous consumption.
2. CHINAM_170412_005.JPG: A Theory of Everything "The ceramic archive recycled and compounded to excess seems to be evidence of a collective unconscious -- vastly weird and wonderful -- that is at the core of our acquisitional urges and desires." -- Walter McConnell Walter McConnell began his series A Theory of Everything after he traveled to China in 2002 and witnessed the mind-boggling ceramics production sites at Jingdezhen. Each sculpture in this series combines hundreds of individual elements -- imitation Ming vases, smiling Buddhas, grim reapers, historical icons, and cartoon characters -- that the artist casts from molds recycled from the hobby industry. After the mineral-rich crystalline glazes on the figures are fired at extremely high temperatures, they create complex surface textures and rich tonal variations. McConnell refers to his ceramic assemblages as stupas due to their simple conical forms. Stupas, which originated in India and spread throughout the Buddhist world, are freestanding structures made to hold holy texts or remains of saints. McConnell's stupas elevate mundane objects that have been endlessly replicated for popular consumption. By comparing his extravagant piles of kitsch to a sacred structure, McConnell asks us to think about the meaning of our own "acquisitional urges" and the desire to collect. The relationship of "the ceramic archive" to collecting and display has a long history in the West. During the Victorian and Gilded Ages of the late nineteenth century, connoisseurs and consumers vied to acquire exported Chinese blue-and-white ceramics. A Theory of Everything brings the ceramic archive, recycled and compounded to excess, into the twenty-first century. As McConnell says, this is evidence not only of a collective unconscious but also of the larger cultural contexts in which objects accrue value and meaning.
3. CHINAM_170412_009.JPG: Punch Lines George du Maurier (1834-1896), the leading cartoonist for the British humor magazine Punch, made his career by skewering the affected habits and aesthetic aspirations of the Victorian middle class. Intimately acquainted with the London art scene -- he had known Whistler since they were students together in Paris -- du Maurier made the term "Chinamania" part of the Victorian era's urban dictionary. His china-crazed men and women are more devoted to their porcelains than to their progeny.
4. CHINAM_170412_013.JPG: Acute Chinamania May: "Mamma!, Mamma! Don't go on like this, pray!!" Mamma (who has smashed a favourite pot): "What have I got left to live for?" May: "Haven't you got me, Mamma?" Mamma: "You, child! You're not unique!! There are six of you - a complete set!!"
5. CHINAM_170412_015.JPG: Chronic Chinamania (Incurable) Aesthetic Bridegroom. "It is quite Consummate, is it not?" Intense Bride. "It is, indeed! Oh Algernon, Let us live up to it!"
6. CHINAM_170412_017.JPG: Incipient Chinamania "O, Mamma! O! O! –N-N-Nurse has given me my C-C Cod-liver oil out of a P-P-Plain White Mug!"
7. CHINAM_170412_020.JPG: Aptly Quoted from the Advertisement Column Thrifty Wife. Oh, Algernon, More useless China! More money thrown away when we have so little to spare!" Amiable Chinamaniac. "Pooh ! Pooh! My Love! ‘Money not so much an object as a comfortable home,' you know!"
8. CHINAM_170412_050.JPG: Porcelain Production at Jingdezhen Jingdezhen has been a center of China's global ceramics industry since the fourteenth century. Trade expanded during the sixteenth century when manufacturers in Jingdezhen and trading companies in the West capitalized on the first documented cases of Chinamania among the European aristocracy. Even after Europeans discovered the secret to making porcelain and began to produce their own Chinese-inspired wares, Jingdezhen retained its global preeminence. Its primacy as a ceramics center did not begin to wane until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the Qing government weakened and trade agreements with Britain and Japan were aggressively implemented. After World War II, the Communist Party in China restored Jingdezhen's ceramics industry by opening state-run factories. Today, government sponsorship has all but disappeared, but the city continues to mass produce utilitarian and decorative porcelain for the world. A growing network of vocational and liberal arts educational institutions now trains Chinese students and offers fellowships and residencies to artists from abroad.
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