Chinoiserie: An Unrequited Architectural Affair

Chinoiserie’s stylistic repertoire in Britain over recent centuries has encompassed a wide range of art practices, but it has remained conspicuously absent from one art form in particular: architecture – the slow art. Despite a promising, prominent and pioneering entrance onto Chinoiserie’s stage in the mid-eighteenth century, most notably through the work of Sir William Chambers, reverence for China in the field of architecture has been negligible when compared with decorative, visual and literary art forms. While acknowledging this relative obscurity, this chapter examines the long and complex architectural relations between Britain and China up to the mid-twentieth century, a seminal epoch in which Chinoiserie was gaining approbation in other art practices, architectural Modernism was at its height internationally, British architects were travelling to or being raised in China in greater numbers than at any time in history, and the first Chinese architects were returning from an education in various foreign countries, including Britain. These myriad architectural interrelations have received relatively little scholarly attention as a collective group in comparison to other art practices while the individual architects, Chinese (such as Luke Him Sau) and British, and their work remain underexplored.

The Idea of the Chinese Garden and British Aesthetic Modernism

This chapter argues that a comparative lack of British interest in traditional Chinese gardens during the period 1880-1914, often interpreted as evidence of Japan’s more ready appeal, obscures the complexity of organic exchange going on between Britain and East Asia at this time. Celebrated plant hunters were launching daring expeditions into unexplored Western China; those plants, upon importation, were so successfully and quickly naturalized that they became evidence of the landscape conformity that Japanese designs were held to resist. What’s more, even as these plant hunters were publishing their travel narratives for a broad audience, select British readers were absorbing a very different view of Chinese gardens through the outré works of French and British writers. Spurred by the retranslation of Thomas De Quincey’s works into French, late nineteenth-century French decadents found inspiration in the same provocative elements of Chinese behavior and landscape that British Romantics had found a century before. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden was read and appreciated by Oscar Wilde, among others, and formed a part of a larger fin-de-siècle European reconsideration of the East. It is the combination of the multiple forms of the Eastern garden that provide a new way of understanding aesthetic internationalism.

Staging China, Excising the Chinese: Lady Precious Stream and the Darker Side of Chinoiserie

This chapter examines the production and reception of Lady Precious Stream by Shih-I Hsiung in the context of British sinophilia in the early twentieth century. This at once comprised a fascination with China circulating among modernist intellectuals and artists, including Bloomsbury circles, and the rather more denigrated vogue for mass-marketed Chinese exotica among the wider public. Lady Precious Stream provides an opportunity to explore the interconnections between the two. The production drew on long established traditions of chinoiserie, making much of 'Chinese-esque' costumes, vases, tapestries, fans. The reception of the play was contradictory. Some hailed it as a highbrow masterpiece, for its non-naturalistic conventions and minimal scenery, which, they argued, freed audiences from the realism of English theatre and placed the Chinese theatre ahead of the most advanced producers in the West. Others, however, responded far less favourably, and characterised Lady Precious Stream, in Northrop Frye’s words, as a ‘slickly tailored piece of Chinoiserie’. By considering the contradictory nature of the play’s production and reception, this chapter interrogates the politics of authorship, identity and exclusion in terrains of chinoiserie and Modernism.

The Oriental and the Music Hall: Sound and Space in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown

Dr Fu Manchu has proved the most enduring of the chinoiserie associated with Limehouse, however, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the space of Chinatown, rather than the representation of any one individual. It begins with a brief consideration of the Limehouse lair created for Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, before focusing attention on the less remembered but once infamous literary chinoiserie of Thomas Burke. In particular, it examines the depiction of sound and music in his early works, and their utilisation in the construction of a Chinatown which was enmeshed within the wider East End, and whose Oriental practices intersected with Victorian music hall. In his combination of ancient Chinese melodies and pre-commercialised music hall, Burke assigned his Chinatown and East End to a previous era, his Limehouse was separated from the rest of London by time, as well as race and class. Although Burke in one sense offers Chinatown as a nostalgic alternative to the encroachment of the modern state and bourgeois culture, he also depicts it as a brutal slum where murder and suicide were commonplace. Burke’s subtly subversive chinoserie oscillates between negative and positive constructions of his synthesis of Victorian working-class and Chinese culture.

Fashion, Chinoiserie and Modernism

Fashion, chinoiserie and Modernism do not necessarily make easy bedfellows. Fashion’s dynamic of continuous experimentation and renewal can be aligned with Modernism’s agenda of artistic reinvention, self-conscious newness and cultural improvement. Dress and interior design were certainly of interest to Modernist designers, and Chinese culture had a significant influence on British avant-garde literature, theatre and the arts. Yet, fashion’s strong conceptual associations with the feminine, with irrational desire and with Western modernity create a complex picture for expressions of Chineseness, and Chinese design often connoted flights of fancy, locations of private pleasure and an intense nostalgia that is antithetical to the progressive and disruptive anti-traditional stance of interwar Modernism. This chapter examines the impact of fashionable chinoiseries in Britain as a culturally important but as yet under-theorised phenomenon of twentieth-century modernity, an equivalent trend to the negrophilia craze of the 1920s and the Primitivist art movement, a hybrid cosmopolitanism and an imperialist Orientalism. The wearing of Mandarin robes as evening coats, the collecting of jades, the lacquering of dressing tables, and the nurturing of Pekingese lapdogs offer new and stimulating ways to reappraise and shed light on the role of the Orient within British Modernism.

Roger Fry, Chinese Art and The Burlington Magazine

The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs was founded in 1903 by a group of art theorists, scholars and historians that included Roger Fry, later a co-editor of the magazine for almost ten years (1909-1919). On Fry’s death in 1934, the magazine itself described him as ‘the man who in the past did most to establish it and mould its character’. Part of this character was a consistent attention to Chinese art that he shared with fellow Bloomsbury writers, artists and intellectuals. This chapter illuminates Fry’s practice as a theorist and an editor interested in the arts of China by examining how these were represented and discussed in the Burlington Magazine under his auspices. It focuses especially on the kinds of language, discourse and textual strategies of sinophile contributors such as Arthur Waley, Lawrence Binyon, Perceval Yetts and R.L. Hobson. The chapter locates their approaches to Chinese art within a longer-term Western historiography of China and its culture(s), as well as within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourses such as aestheticism, scientism and orientalism. It thus attempts to unpack the ideological implications of the ‘connoisseurship’ professed by the magazine’s title as applied to the subject of Chinese art.

Shared Affinities: Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf

Though the term chinoiserie has historically been applied to the decorative and visual arts, this chapter explores its theoretical and practical extension into literature in a specific conversation among and about three female writers from England and China, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Ling Shuhua, presenting a notion of chinoiserie as a valuable aesthetic training of the British visual and reading eye. Woolf, for example, valued the writing of Ling Shuhua-- labeled ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’ in China-- for ‘the charm of the unlikeness’ of her aesthetic perceptions. The Chinese admired the writing of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, translating them into Chinese beginning in the 1920s. This aesthetic reciprocity informs the theoretical and methodological issues in this chapter which weaves the style of ‘chinoiserie,’ feminism and modernism into a cross-cultural ‘conversation.’

‘Beautiful, baleful absurdity’: Chinoiserie and Modernist Ballet

The post-war return of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London in 1918 was heralded by colourful posters of a ‘Chinaman’ complete with trailing pigtail. This was Picasso’s design for the Chinese Conjurer in Jean Cocteau’s ballet, Parade (1914). However Parade would not receive its London premiere until months later. While the avant-garde Parade had a distinctly minority appeal, Picasso’s Chinese Conjurer was a shrewdly commercial choice, testament to the British love affair with theatrical chinoiserie. This chapter examines the ways its engagement with chinoiserie contributed to the development of Modernist ballet. It starts with Alexandre Benois’ designs for Stravinsky’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Nightingale’ in 1914. Diaghilev re-adapted it in 1917 as Le Chant du Rossignol, commissioning Italian Futurist designer, Fortunata Depero. In its juxtaposition of artifice with nature, ‘The Nightingale’ lent itself to modernist treatment. Depero’s kinetic sculpture garden of cones and discs peopled by geometrical court ladies and mandarins was never staged, but in 1919 Diaghilev revived the idea, bringing Henri Matisse to work with choreographer Léonide Massine in London. In 1925 Diaghilev revived Matisse’s Le Chant du Rossignol for a third time with new choreography by George Balanchine fresh from the Soviet avant garde.

Chinese Artistic Influences on the Vorticists in London

This chapter examines how young poets and artists became interested in Chinese art that in the 1910s was expressed in the tenets of Vorticism. When Ezra Pound came to London in 1908 he got involved in the circle of British poets, artists and critics who held regular social gatherings at the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street. Among them was Laurence Binyon, poet and Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, who shared with the group his scholarship in Oriental painting. When Binyon was developing his friendship with Pound, Percy Wyndham Lewis and other British Modernists, new art movements were rapidly emerging in Europe. At the same traditional Chinese art was becoming available in museums and in London and other Western art markets. Coinciding with a dynamic change in modern European art, Oriental ideas became an alternative source of inspiration for the West. In 1914, Pound collaborated with Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to promote a new artistic movement for which Pound coined the name Vorticism. Gaudier-Brzeska took his inspiration from Chinese animal bronzes of the Zhou dynasty and Lewis from the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty. Their common interest in Chinese art, helped formulate the principles of Vorticism.

China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter begins with an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the idea of China as an ‘aesthetic’ culture, or one that might be best apprehended through an aesthetic lens, in contrast to the ‘theoretical’ disposition of the West. In order to examine the function of the idea of a ‘Chinese aesthetic’ for Modernist writers, and the Bloomsbury group in particular, it focuses on Lytton Strachey’s play The Son of Heaven (1913), asking what imaginative needs does it serve and which characteristic features of Modernism the ‘Chinese aesthetic’ enables or brings to the foreground? In doing so it explains the origins of the early 20c obsession with Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty, and how this poetry came to embody the notion of a Chinese civilizational aesthetic.