Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstanding project that combines my experience in making experimental porcelain sculptures, and the vision of communicating past and present Westen seafaring cultures and East/West trade in a contemporary way.

Project description:

1. My Personal Experience and Understanding of ‘Exotic dreams’ and ‘Poetic misunderstanding’

Through my upbringing in China my grandparents read Scandinavian mythology to me. Thus I became besotted with western fairy tales about the sea. As a child in China, I considered Europe to be an exotic world partly due to the political dichotomy that separated the West from the East. It was during that time my ‘exotic dreams’ and ‘poetic misunderstanding’ of the West fermented and grew. I formulated the concept of ‘poetic misunderstanding’ as a result of attempting to explore the theme of ‘imagination’ and the cultural curiosity the West and the East had about each other. Herein, the histories of the West and the East as embodied in the production, export and interpretation of porcelain are treated as complex cultural-cognitive processes intertwined with my own subjective place-to-place experiences. Practically, I wish to elucidate these histories through contemporary art. My project seeks to illuminate and transform the concepts of ‘exotic dreaming’ and ‘poetic misunderstanding’ through metaphoric imageries of sailors’ tattoos of the West, and blue and white paintings on porcelain of the East. The project also depicts the moment when poetic misunderstanding from both West and East cross over each other simultaneously and cultural exchanges occur – often at a subliminal level.

2. World of Metaphors and Reconsideration of History

Imagery of the ocean embodies idealisation of the unknown. People relate to the ocean in various ways. The colour blue, which is alluding to the ocean, is prevailing in both tattoos and Chinese porcelain. Europe encountered China through porcelain. However, elements of ideology and symbolism associated with the East were not easily accessible through the familiar cobalt blue pigments and hand-painted imagery. As the porcelain market grew in Europe from the 16th century onwards, the production and exportation of porcelain facilitated a form of cultural transaction between China and Europe.

By the beginning of the 17th century the export of Chinese porcelainto Europe reached its peak. The Portuguese who had established their base in Macau, were the first to bring Chinese porcelain out of China through India through the Sea Silk Road, parts of East Africa and finally to Lisbon where products were assembled and shipped northwards to the rest of Europe re.The late 17th century was characterised by an increased level of cultural communication on a global scale. On these grounds, the commodification of stories of the Orient in addition to a new range of popular media that romanticised the Far East invoked general interest in exotic items such as Chinese tableware. Thus the Chinese export porcelain as a connection with the exotic offered Europe ‘a bite’ of the exotic world

European importers would bring European made sketches or models of tableware forms over the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope and across South- east Asia to Guangdong harbour and then further on to Jingdezhen, where they requested Chinese artisans to replicate the designs in porcelain and decorate the final products with Chinese patterns. Although Chinese artisans did not have any knowledge of the western table culture that this tableware was a product of, for instance not knowing how a sauceboat functioned, they took up the challenges to create moulds and to paint patterns based upon these models. This cultural exchange based on the cultural appropriation of physical models and selected Chinese patterns took place in such a way that the exported items embodied the Europeans’ interpretation of China’s ‘exoticness’ rather than cultural and social insight at an emic level.

It is from this interchange of cultural fragments I derive the concept of ‘poetic misunderstanding’. In my point of view, the artist actively engagesin the social life of the place he lives in. I kept considering the relations between myself and immediate society and culture, in addition to how an artist should come to terms with these relations. I also thought about how I experienced the differences and similarities of both cultures and how these can be bridged through my art practice. I look forward to discovering new perspectives on related topics that go beyond the horizons of my own cultural epistemology.