Material Chineseness: Ink and Porcelain in Contemporary Art beyond National Borders

Identity and materiality are intimately and inextricably intertwined. This bond is clear even in the everyday vocabulary of self: velvet skin, silken hair, pearly teeth, a complexion as dark as ebony or pale as porcelain. We signal our regard for an attractive physical quality by ascribing it objective materiality. These epithets for persons-as-objects imply a corresponding vocabulary of objects-as-persons, exemplified by the anthropomorphism of ceramic terms: mouth, belly, foot, shoulder, lip, for example. Certain materials also lend themselves to cultural affiliation— Chinese porcelain, African ivory, American cotton, Australian ochre—often used to support essentialist assertions of identity. If specifically material qualities are emphasised, however, correspondence between objects and individuals can provide a flexible model of identification in which such abstractions are replaced with a tangible, historically and geographically inflected specificity. Anne Anlin Cheng has provided a useful theoretical framework for this understanding of racial and cultural identity, with the model of ‘ornamental personhood’ outlined in Ornamentalism, her paradigm-shifting study of Asian femininity, in which she traces the complex relations of accumulation and adaptation fusing subjects and objects. Through a focused analysis of porcelain and ink as case studies for this phenomenon in a Chinese context, this paper proposes a parallel model of ‘material Chineseness’ as a substitute for the established paradigm of cultural China, theorised most notably by New Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming. In contrast to the ideals of linear continuity and radiating diffusion from a perceived centre to which this paradigm lends authority, material Chineseness is intended to foreground the diffuse, diverse, and adaptable dimensions of cultural identification. In Australia, Ah Xian’s 阿仙 (b. 1960) China China series (1998–2004) has shown the suitability of porcelain for this conceptual model, while works by Taiwaneseborn Charwei Tsai 蔡佳葳 (b. 1980) and Hong Kong–born Hung Keung 洪强 (b. 1970) demonstrate that ink, too, can support circulations of Chineseness