MATTERS OF TASTE
Nordenhake, 2019
It would take approximately two thousand years for the earth’s longest continuous political empire to finally learn, the hard way, that it was not the center of the world. No eponymous ‘middle kingdom’, but a periphery to others with comparable self-regard. A state which, as the loss of the Opium Wars, the looting and despoil of the irreplaceable Summer Palace, and the indignity of foreign concessions on home soil would establish, was now one among many. This lesson struck at the root of Chinese life. Thereafter: civil war, the waning of imperial style, and heterogeneous visions of modernization. The founding of the People’s Republic of China (in 1949) established a final rupture, abolishing the throne and, eventually, with the onset of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (in 1964), rejecting the past’s material trappings—temples were smashed, scrolls burnt, and countless artworks destroyed in a paroxysm of (manipulated) historical-self-loathing. And yet, despite this, analogous to the syncretic manner whereby animist iconography haunts Buddhist art, aspects of imperial style could never be completely excised. Like aesthetic muscle memory, certain elements could not help but return, here and there—a decorative motif, on a bowl, perhaps, where no one was looking for ideology; elsewhere, still...