A Porcelain Aesthetic? “New Export China” in Contemporary Chinese Art

In his rationale for the expansive survey show Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maxwell K. Hearn argued for the existence of an “ink aesthetic” in Chinese art. He used this definition to encompass a wide range of formats and techniques, shifting focus from the material and technical components of a work to the concepts and intentions motivating its creation. New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (2023) argues for a comparable ‘porcelain aesthetic’. While just as venerable and refined as ink, porcelain never quite gained the same cultural cachet, tarnished by association with manual labour and mercantile professionalism. In this talk, drawing from New Export China, Alex will demonstrate that this material has nonetheless provided an equally rich source of inspiration for contemporary artists.

Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian, arts writer, and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. He specialises in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, and intersections of the personal and material. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the myriad ways in which Chinese artists, inside and outside China, have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of personal and cultural identity. Most recently, he has edited and contributed to Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), an interdisciplinary collection of essays by scholars in Australia, the UK, and China interrogating methods of object biography through a transcultural lens.