Admission requirements
Not applicable
Description
The course will explore the circulation of materials, surfaces, and designs between China and Europe during the early modern period, highlighting how these exchanges shaped new ways of displaying, representing, and making. The objects resulting from these cross-cultural interactions embody complex entanglements of knowledge diffusion, appropriations, and aesthetic transfers—many of which remain elusive in written records.
From the sixteenth-century onward, elite interiors, gardens, and fashion increasingly reflected these encounters in unprecedented ways. These exchanges entailed various forms of translation, visible, for instance, in artworks crafted by Chinese artists specifically for the European taste and by Europeans imitating Chinese technologies and reinterpreting designs. Such objects circulated through ‘contact zones’ as Guangzhou, Macao, Beijing, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and London, before traveling further across the globe. They found their way into European merchants’ homes, royal palaces, Jesuit publications, and Chinese imperial collections. By the mid-eighteenth century, many of these objects exemplified the intensification of European colonial ambitions on global scale, leading to the exploitation of people, resources, and the environment, as well as the displacement of animals and plants.
Throughout the course, we will study a variety of visual and material sources, including Chinese blue-and-white porcelains exported to seventeenth-century Netherlands; Guangzhou-designed wallpapers made for European markets; European-made Chinoiserie silks; Suzhou woodblock prints integrating western linear perspective; and clocks crafted in France for the Qianlong court. Through these case studies, we will critically engage with concepts such as ‘export art’, ‘Chinoiserie’ and ‘Occidenterie’, while reflecting to what extent these notions can still be meaningful today and on their intersections—or tensions—with contemporary art historical discourse on ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ perspectives.
Course objectives
Concise description of the course objectives formulated in terms of knowledge, insight and skills students will have acquired at the end of the course. The relationship between these objectives and achievement levels for the programme should be evident.
Become familiar with current debates on the study of early modern cross-cultural art, with a particular focus on China-Europe exchange
Critically engage with theories and arguments relevant to the study of early modern visual and material culture within the framework of global history
Identify primary and secondary sources relevant to their research tropic
Formulate clear and coherent arguments
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Assessment method
Please indicate here how the course is assessed.
Possibilities (Note that in case of mid-term examinations the weighting must be specified and how the final mark is established):
Active participation/ cooperation in class/group
Essay, paper
Abstract, oral presentation
Assessment
Weighing
To complete the final mark, please take notice of the following:
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average. To pass the course, the weighted average of the partial grades must be 5.5 or higher.
or
The final mark for the course is established by (i) determination of the weighted average combined with (ii) additional requirements.
These additional requirements typically involve that one or more of the partial exams must be passed with a minimum assessment. If applicable, include the additional requirements above.
Resit
Please describe how the resit will be arranged. The resit may consist of the same subtests as the first opportunity, but this is not compulsory. The alternative is to combine subtests for the resit. Offering a resit is mandatory.
Resits will be allowed only for the final essay (60% of the course). A re-sit for other course components is not possible
Inspection and feedback
- Class participation 20%
- Presentation 20%
- Final research paper 60%
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
The booktitles and / or syllabi to be used in the course, where it can be purchased and how this literature should be studied beforehand.
Readings will be available through the University Library or provided by the instructor
1. Which Kind of Exchange? Encounters/Conflicts
Cooke, Edward S. “Introduction.” In Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History, 1–20. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello. “The Global Lives of Things: Material Culture in the First Global Age.” In The Global Lives of Things, 1-28. Routledge, 2015.
2. Defining Categories
Kleutghen, Kristina. “Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of ‘Western’ Objects in Eighteenth-Century China.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 117–35.
Porter, David. “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 395–411.
3. Collections
Shih, Ching-fei. “Unknown Transcultural Objects: Turned Ivory Works by the European Rose Engine Lathe in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court.” EurAsian Matters, 2018, 57.
Grasskamp, Anna. “Chapter 2: Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet.” In Conchophilia, 49–71. Princeton University Press, 2021.
4. Surfaces
Ambrosio, Elisa, Francine Giese, Alina Martimyanova, and Hans Bjarne Thomsen. China and the West: Reconsidering Chinese Reverse Glass Painting. Arts Du Verre / Glass Art / Glaskunst : Nouvelles Recherches Du Vitrocentre Romont / New Research by Vitrocentre Romont / Neue Forschungen Des Vitrocentre Romont , 1. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. (chapter tbc)
Étienne, Noémie. “Technology: Cultural Transfer, Imitation, and Improvement in Materials and Surfaces of the Interior.” In Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stacey Sloboda, 37–57. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2024.
5. Curation: Object Viewing
Excursion to Museum/ Gallery in Amsterdam or Leiden
Exhibitions overview:
2013-2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ‘Interwoven Globe’, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/interwoven-globe
2015-2016, Peabody Essex, Salem, & Rijskmuseum, Amsterdam, ‘Asia> Amsterdam
2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ‘Monstrous Beauty’ https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/monstrous-beauty-a-feminist-revision-of-chinoiserie/exhibition-objects
6. Broadening the Map
Choi, Irene. “Tactile Vision in Eighteenth-Century Korean Still-Lifbce, or Ch’aekkŏri.” Journal18, Field Notes, no. 9 (Spring 2020). https://www.journal18.org/4868.
Meier, Sandy Prita. “Chinese Porcelain and Muslim Port Cities: Mercantile Materiality in Coastal East Africa.” Art History 38, no. 4 (September 1, 2015): 702–17.
7. Pattern Books, Albums, Pictures
Bellemare, Julie. “Design Books in the Chinese Taste: Marketing the Orient in England and France, 1688–1735.” Journal of Design History 27, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 1–16.
Wang, Ching-Ling. “A Dutch Model for a Chinese Woodcut: On Han Huaide’s Herding a Bull in a Forest.” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Online 66, no. 1 (2016): 232.
Or: Lai, Yu-chih. “Domesticating the Global and Materializing the Unknown: A Study on Album of Beasts at the Qianlong Court.” In EuroAsian Objects: Art and Material Culture in Global Exchange, 1600-1800, edited by Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja, 125–74. Springer, 2018.
8. Textiles, Fashion, Dress
Cheang, Sarah. “Fashion, Chinoiserie and Modernism.” In British Modernism and Chinoiserie. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Rado, Mei Mei. The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court. Yale University Press, 2025. (chapter tbc)
9. Spaces
Tillerot, Isabelle. East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe. J. Paul Getty Trust, 2024.
Wu, Hung. “From the House of Green Delights to the Hall of Mental Cultivation: Mirror-Screens in the Literary and Visual Imagination.” In The Full-Lenght Mirror: A Global Visual History, 95–140. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.
10. Ecological Entanglements
Greenberg, Daniel. “Taxonomy of Empire: The Compendium of Birds as an Epistemic and Ecological Representation of Qing China.” Journal18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, April 4, 2019. https://www.journal18.org/issue7/taxonomy-of-empire-the-compendium-of-birds-as-an-epistemic-and-ecological-representation-of-qing-china/
Richard, Josepha. “Collecting Chinese Flora: Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Sino-British Scientific and Cultural Exchanges as Seen through British Collections of China Trade Botanical Paintings.” Ming Qing Yanjiu 24, 2020, no. 2 (2020): 209–44.
11. Concluding Discussion: Visual and Material Culture Beyond Borders Today
Cohen, Joshua I., Foad Torshizi, and Vazira Zamindar. “Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn.” ARTMargins 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2023): 3–17.
Huppatz, D. J. “Globalizing Design History and Global Design History.” Journal of Design History 28, no. 2 (2015): 182–202.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Registration À la carte education, Contract teaching and Exchange
Information for those interested in taking this course in context of À la carte education (without taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.
Information for those interested in taking this course in context of Contract teaching (with taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.
For the registration of exchange students contact Humanities International Office.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Herta Mohr
Remarks
None