Feminine Space and Playthings: Recontextualization of Trompe l’Oeil Porcelain in High Qing China
Chih-En Chen is the recipient of our prestigious George de Menasce Memorial Trust Award.
Chih-En Chen’s research fills the gap in the historiography of Qing porcelain manufacture and the survey of Europeanerie in 18th century China. Existing scholarships are problematic while considering the Qing trompe l’oeil porcelain and the related connoisseurship in a scenario of de-contextualization. Through Chenshedang’an and Qianziwenhao indicating the original location of the artefacts from the Qing Imperial Household Department, kept in the NPM and the Palace Museum, re-contextualization of Qing trompe l’oeil porcelain may become possible. A trip funded by Oriental Ceramic Society through the George de Menasce award to the Palace Museum will ensure the collection of the Qianziwenhao data. Professor Huang Weiwen at the museum will provide access to the archives. Ultimately redefining the origin and the classification of Qing trompe l’oeil art, the present research is promising for its potential contributions to enriching the studies of the East/West exchange. Furthermore, the unprecedented ideology of trompe l’oeil art as wanqi (trinket) will be discussed in order to understand not only the distinct purpose of commissioning artefacts but also the differentiated connoisseurship between the emperors and the women living within the imperial precinct.
We are grateful to Woolley & Wallis for their sponsorship of the refreshments.
Speaker
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Chih-En ChenPhD Candidate, Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at SOASChih-En Chen is a Lecturer of East Asian Art History at the University of Toronto (UofT), Canada. He is also a PhD Candidate at the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London, and a Doctoral Fellow at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Ottawa, Canada. His research interests lie primarily in Chinese ceramics and material culture, artisanal knowledge, art in Eurasian context, gendered spaces and objects, Chan Buddhism, and the relationship between art and medicine.
His doctoral thesis, entitled Fictionality, Space and Playthings: A Recontextualization of High Qing Trompe l’oeil Porcelain, sets its focus on exploring trompe l’oeil works of art in the long 18th century imperial China.
He has worked as a curatorial assistant in Tim Yip Studio and Blue Dragon Art Company in Taipei (2009-2012), Christie’s Toronto Office (2013-2014) and Waddington’s Auctioneers in Canada (2014-2018).
He received his first degree from Tzu-Chi University (Taiwan) in Bioengineering and graduated with an MA in History of Art from the University of Toronto. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Beckman Institute (2008) and Academia Sinica (2018), awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships from Canada (2017), GSSA Fellowship from Taiwan (2018), The BADA Friends Prize in Memory of Brian Morgan (2020), and the Chiang Ching-Kou CCK Fellowships for Ph.D. Dissertations (2020-2021).
He has published internationally, including articles in the CCFA Journal (Taipei), Cultural World Relics (Beijing), and Les Cahiers de Framespa (Toulouse),
