The Art of Display: Chinese Objects in Historical Contexts and Modern Museums

IIAS Outreach Lecture by Jan Stuart,  in cooperation with the Hulsewe-Wazniewski Foundation, the VVAK and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. 

Program

09.30: Registration and reception with coffee & tea in the Foyer
10.30: Lecture by mrs Jan Stuart in the Auditorium

Registration is required:  http://vvak.nl/activiteiten/aanmelden-activiteiten/     

The lecture

The lecture explores the practices and concepts behind the display of Chinese art from two perspectives: the customs followed by collectors, including imperial patrons, in the Song to Qing dynasties and the challenges faced by today’s curators and designers in creating Chinese galleries in Western institutions. The Qing dynasty dramatist Li Yu (1611–ca.1679) stated that the proper arrangement of objects in a home was as critical as the proper deployment of a talented official, thereby revealing that centuries ago the educated class was fretting about the “right way” or “best way” to display, just as much as modern museum goers expect artifacts to be displayed in meaningful and pleasing ways.

In planning the installation of new galleries—at The British Museum in 2009 for the world-renowned Sir Percival David Collection of nearly 1700 Chinese ceramics; and currently working on a re-installation of the Chinese galleries at the Freer in 2017—she  began to investigate practices of viewing/displaying art in China. This talk brings together the experiences and complexities of fashioning new public displays of Chinese art while incorporating references to the practices of traditional display. Objects, whether they are paintings, ceramics, or sculptures—any medium at all—take on additional significance if viewed as being a part of a network of relationships, rather than considered in isolation. How do the changing networks of associations between when and where an object was made (pre-modern China) and when and where an object is displayed (21st century Western museum) dictate how it is displayed. 

The speaker

Jan Stuart is the Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which are the national museums of Asian art in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.  She re-joined the curatorial staff in 2014 to concentrate on the arts of later imperial China, from the 10th century on, with a current focus on ceramics and decorative arts. Previously, she was a curator at the Freer|Sackler between 1988 and 2006 focusing on Buddhist arts, Chinese portraits and court paintings, decorative arts, and garden design—fields in which she organized exhibitions, made acquisitions, and wrote publications.

From 2006 to 2014, Stuart was Keeper of Asia at The British Museum, heading a department in charge of a collection of some 125,000 Asian objects from prehistory to the contemporary. She was active in shaping the BM’s collaborations with Asian cultural partners and she projects to create two new galleries: the Sir Joseph Hotung Centre that houses the Sir Percival David Collection of Chinese ceramics and a gallery for Chinese painting with a new display of the ancient Admonitions scroll, about which she wrote a new introductory book. Stuart was active in acquisitions, publishing and lecturing, including on the topic of the connection between festivals and art production and display in China, and she supervised, curated, or contributed to many exhibitions, including Xu Bing’s “Background Story” and “Ming: 50 years that changed China.”