Hong Kong, Feb 27, 2025, on-line, https://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk
Pierson is a professor of Chinese ceramics at SOAS London and currently a visiting professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong. This was a first lecture in a series of four. The topic of this lecture was (interior) architecture used for porcelain displays.
She started from the most prominent display, the porcelain room, which originated in Netherlands followed by England and other colonial powers. From another angle, one could say that the porcelain room originated in the cupboard as a storage space that was expanded further into space as a site of collecting and display. The porcelain room display mode (EC comment: together with the walk-in storage) is now experiencing a renaissance in museum displays. The mass-arrangement of objects enables a transformation of the objects themselves where new meaning is produced not from the objects but from the arrangement itself. Pierson likened it to “consumption”, which is an expression of a certain taste/meaning by selecting individual objects for consumption. In the case of a porcelain room, the taste/meaning is not expressed by the objects themselves, but by the arrangements of the objects.
EC thought 1: A lot of the porcelain room displays do not allow to actually observe the porcelain closely (and make it impossible to use). It is turned it into a purely decorative ornament. Now when the porcelain room display method is making a return into museum displays, could it be seen as a representation of a wider revival of a tendency of conspicuous consumption/ overabundance/ mannerism? Museums that have more objects in storage than they ever can display? Consumers/visitors that are used to never-ending image and video feeds and demand similar overwhelming experiences? Museums competing with Tiktok feeds?
EC thought 2: Porcelain rooms and their revival as a method of museum display can be seen within a larger context of attachment to objects/ collecting that effaces their original function and reinvents them as pure ornaments without function, maybe because they do not have any functional value anymore. Eg. vinyl records, that physically represent music, but were replaced by digital music. Or sneakers, that – when collected en masse – cannot be worn anymore by the owner and become simply a physical representation of a certain obsession. Porcelain was also consumer product, elevated to a collectible status simply because the functional use for the owner was lost (given the amassed quantities).
Pierson provided a detailed discussion of Charlottenburg Berlin porcelain rooms (18.c.), porcelain pyramid at Santos Palace Lisbon (17.c.), Palacio Fronteira Lisbon, some palace in the Middle East whose name I forgot, London Peacock Room, Hainhofer Kunstschrank and Trianon de Porcelaine Versaille (fake Chinaware/Delft).
Her conclusion: Porcelains were secondary to the space and should be observed like that, not the other way around.
EC thought 3: But how about the introductory statement that a porcelain room is in fact just an overgrown cupboard? Doesn’t that suggest that still, the cups were there first? Then, when they did not fit anymore, a bigger cupboard was built etc? Isn’t this all a chicken and egg discussion? And isn’t it as stated in EC thought 1 and 2 a typical development, where an object loses it primary functional use and starts to be used as a purely decorative element? During this shift the focus obviously moves from the object itself to the larger storage/display framework that deploys the original object (in large quantities) as a decorative element?
