Q. You have just returned from the International Colloquim on Chinese Art History held at Taipei's National Palace Museum. What was your impression of the museum?
A. This was my first trip to Taiwan and I was very impressed from the moment I arrived at Chiang Kai-shek Airport. The museum organized everything down to the last detail. Some of the participating scholars joked that we would be too embarrassed to invite scholars from Taiwan to any conferences after this because we could never do it this way! Of course, on an occasion bringing together world experts on Chinese culture, it was a shame that mainland scholars could not travel, especially those concerned with the earlier periods, for which they might have brought information about the most recent discoveries.
A Bit Like a Pilgrim
Outside the conference we also visited the museum's collections and got a rare sight of some of the world's most rare treasures, like the great works of Wang Hsi-chih. Compared to such collections, what we have in our Far-Eastern departments in the West is really nothing. The National Palace Museum is a truly a holy place for Chinese antiquity and I felt a bit like a pilgrim.
What impressed me most about the museum was not only the amazing collections, the good preservation, the quality of the abundant publications or the nice the tea-room and garden; I spent a lot of time talking with the museum staff, even going to the store rooms to see and discuss various items with them. I felt that it was these people who were really the showcase. Young and educated in Taiwan, it seemed that every one of them had more than one foreign language. I was really impressed by that.
Q. I heard that it was quite a shock when Mme Chiang Kai-shek made her speech raising the question of returning art treasures to China which had been taken in times of war. What did you think?
Standing in History
A. Actually, Mme Chiang's speech had already been supplied to us before she made it so we knew what she was going to say. Coming from Britain you occasionally hear the same question being asked by many countries, so it was not such a shock. In fact, you can say that what really caused a sensation for the whole conference was when everyone saw this personification of twentieth-century history walk out and stand under the portrait of Sun Yatsen. Everyone spontaneously just stood up and gave her a great standing ovation. I was very moved and felt that I was really standing in history.
As well as Mme Chiang, the prime minister of the R.O.C. also came and shook hands with us. He even sat down and listened in on two sessions of the conference. At that time I thought to myself "please say something interesting!" Unfortunately they were extremely academic subjects. Yet this also impressed me deeply, that a member of the government should support and show such interest in a conference on the arts. This is something we could not imagine happening here.
Q. What do you think about returning art treasures?
A. I think that the implications of this problem are too complicated to go into now. The most apparent problem is whether, under the present situation, things should be given back to Taipei or Peking? Of course it is very regrettable for the Chinese that their national treasures have been spread overseas. But frankly speaking, when you weigh it up, compared with the quality of the objects in the National Palace Museum, what has gone overseas is really hardly anything.
What we can do now is make sure that we look after these things properly and increase people's respect and understanding of Chinese culture. Moreover, everyone knows that the flow of art treasures from the mainland is very serious, so most museums in the West have a strict rule of not buying anything that has left under suspicious circumstances. This could be considered to be a passive way of ensuring that art treasures remain in China.
Q. The V&A is also a world-leading museum and your work here is to care for Chinese relics. What is it like working here?
A Sense of Discovery
A. My specialty is China. The Chinese objects in the museum used to be scattered throughout various departments until 1970, when the Far Eastern Collection was formed. Since then we have had people looking at a whole range of materials and looking at them in relation to the culture in which they were produced. I came to work at the museum in 1979, and still, even 21 years after the collection was established, there is a sense of discovery--I do not mean physically finding things but certainly trying to realize what things are.
Q. You were originally a Ph.D. student in the field of Chinese studies and wrote a dissertation on Mongolian literature. What were the pros and cons of giving up hoary academia to come here and pass the days in the company of antiquity?
A. I graduated from the Chinese department at Cambridge University and after two years of Ph.D. research at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I felt quite lonely because I like to work with people. I saw this job advertised in the museum so I thought I would give it a go. I said at the museum that I have not really worked with objects but I have read a lot of Ming and Ch'ing fiction, which is a tremendous source of information. The fact that it is not entirely a Chinese studies atmosphere at the museum was one of the most attractive things about the place for me.
Not everybody is interested in China in this building. Everyone has their own department and their own enthusiasm, so it constantly fertilizes your thinking about China. I am interested particularly in the Ming period, so to talk to scholars of Renaissance Europe, or England under the Tudors, is a very rich experience because it makes you think of what is the same and what is different about China. I have therefore written a book called Superfluous Things--Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, which is to be published in the next couple of months, which is a comparison of attitudes to luxury goods in the late Ming with attitudes that were held in Europe in the same period.
It is interesting that we are at a period intellectually where "things" are becoming much more vitally important for historians. Historians in a number of European fields are increasingly starting to look at objects not as sort of illustrations but as a central cultural part of the period they are studying. I would see myself as working in this field of cultural history which has links with the kind of work being done about early modern Europe and early modern Britain, not just in Chinese art history.
At the Sharp End of Explaining Chinese Culture
The other good thing about working in a museum is that there are two levels of activity: there is the very scholarly, which goes into articles that maybe only six people read; but there is also the task of putting that scholarship into books that will provide an introduction to the general public. Being a public institution owned by the taxpayer we are at the sharp end of explaining Chinese culture to a non-specialist audience and stimulating their interest. This is very different to being in a department of Chinese where everyone accepts that there are certain ways the subject goes and that there are certain rules to follow.
Q. How do you go about getting a Western audience interested in Chinese things? It must be a huge responsibility. Perhaps you could tell us first how you yourself became interested in Chinese culture?
A. When I was in my teens it was visiting museums that got me interested in China. Practically every British museum has some Chinese things, because so many people went out East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aberdeen in Scotland, where I grew up, was the same. So even as a child, when visiting the Aberdeen art gallery, there were Chinese things there that grabbed my imagination.
After I came to this museum I spent a lot of time examining the collections and trying to find out new things about it. Then I published the series of books on Chinese Export Water Colours, Chinese Export Art and Design and The History of Chinese Furniture. Recently I have been concentrating my research on the Ming dynasty.
Q. Was making Chinese export art the topic of your research and the subject of the new gallery due to the large amount of export art in the collection, or did it arise out of your own interests?
A. The classic book on Chinese export art was published in the 1950s. I bought it when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. So it seems that I already felt an interest at that time.
As for the collection of Chinese export art here, it is very rich, although not massive in quality. We felt that here is a coherent collection of Chinese export material that deserves to be looked at as a whole. A lot of the work that had been done on Chinese export art had been done by people who were scholars of English furniture and English interiors. They had written more about what people in the West had thought and had not done anything to integrate Chinese export art with the history of Chinese art for the domestic Chinese market. It was even forgotten at times that these things were actually made in China.
Of course, the most important thing was that someone supplied the funds to allow us to realize our ideas. The sponsor was Mr. Godfrey, who has lived in Hong Kong for twenty or thirty years. Most of the people in Hong Kong are Cantonese, of course, and it could be said that Chinese export art is a part of the cultural tradition of the Pearl River delta.
Q. How did you make the results of this research accessible to a wider audience in the gallery and how did you stimulate their interest?
A. Well, in my experience galleries are not a good place to give subtle messages. You can say subtle things in a book but in a gallery you have to have a very simple message, because people are standing up and if it is boring they will walk away. They are tired and thinking about a cup of tea. So the main message of the gallery is simply that these things were made in China, the Chinese craftsmen were extremely good at making things for the West, and that the Chinese covered a wide variety of crafts for a very long period.
Actually, there are a lot of historical subjects for people to think about here, but it could not all be put in the exhibition. A good exhibition does not force ideas on you but makes you ask questions and get interested.
Q. So the small and concentrated structure of the Chinese Export Art Gallery is thanks to the principle of simple explanation?
A. Of course. Obviously, if you are interested in Chinese export art you might not think that this was a very big display. The trouble is that the Chinese collection, although good, is not the only collection in the museum. There are also people who are interested in French silver and English watercolors. For myself, I would be happy if it was much bigger but some people would like it to be smaller.
The solution is that we have the dense galleries upstairs. They are treated as being for people who are really interested in a subject. People who are visiting the museum for the first time tend to stay in what we call the "Art and Design" galleries, whereas those galleries upstairs which are called the "Materials and Techniques" galleries are really for people who are already interested.
Q. After going upstairs you can buy a book.
A. I hope so. I am always thinking of how people are to get interested in the first place. This museum and our collections constitute a major point of access for British people to China's very rich cultural past. People do not suddenly wake up and say, "I think I will go and get a book about the T'ang dynasty." But they do see the horses or the camels and think they want to know more. Then they start off by maybe buying one of our books, which are for general readers.
The advantage of "things" over books is that they can slip across cultural barriers much more easily than texts. The number of people who have thought that a Chinese vase is beautiful is higher than the number who have thought that Hung Lou Meng is a great novel. Conversely, the number of Chinese people who have enjoyed the architecture of Rome is greater than the number who have read Dante. That does not mean that the vase is more important than Hung Lou Meng, but it has that possibility of slipping across the cultural barrier.
Material culture, because it is physically there, has the power to elude time: here is this vase made in 1500 and here we are sitting in 1991. That vase does not represent 1500, it "is" 1500, a piece of 1500 that is here now. That is utterly amazing and that is why museums are such important places, because they are places where you come face to face with the survival of things.
This brings us into big philosophical ground about art replacing religion. Art does replace religious faith certainly in Europe in the nineteenth century. The museum looks like a cathedral and its physical shape takes over the idea that it is a cathedral of knowledge.
Q. I recently read novel in which the main character is a porcelain collector in Prague. His view is that porcelain needs to be lovingly caressed. If you put it in a frigid museum gallery then it is finished, like a pet in the zoo. Because of this, he saw curators as his enemies and said that museums should be looted every fifty years to free the items and let them breathe. Doubtless you do not agree?
"It Is Easy for Rich People to Say Something Is Dead in a Museum"
A. I have read that book, too. The author was a collector and he had dealings with us in the past. The character in the book had a classic collector mentality which basically comes down to "I am rich and you are not." It is easy for rich people to say that something is dead when it is in a museum. The option for most people is not between a museum or your own private collection, it is between going to a museum or not seeing these things at all.
Things might be deprived of their original function in a museum, yet they gain something because they become the sources of dreams and ideas by being seen by a much larger number of people. One does the gallery and pushes it out into the world and that is when it begins to live, because there are people down there having experiences that are not the experiences I have with the objects. You create the ingredients, but everyone constructs their own experience from what you lay out for them.
"What More Could I Possible Want?"
Q. Are you a collector yourself?
A. No, not now. I suppose that everybody goes through a stage of collecting. I used to go around antique shops with the hope of finding some great treasure. But the interesting thing is that, in my experience, when you join a museum the desire to collect disappears completely. Here I have got the biggest collection of Chinese antiques to deal with. What more could I possibly want? Of course some curators do collect, although often they do not collect things that are within their own specialization.
Q. There is probably a connection between the obsession of the collector and the general desire of people to see things. I am very curious to know what kind of relationship exists between the curator himself and the objects in his collection?
"One Does Not Have to Like Everything One Is Interested In"
A. We have a series of internal lectures about what it means to be a curator. There was one this morning when a colleague from the European ceramics department said what I would agree with, that it is a very intense relationship of care and maintenance. What it must not become is the kind of relationship where I use my power over things to keep them from you. The responsibility must be that I am there to share things with you and not to keep them from you.
On the other hand, one does not have to like everything that one is intellectually interested in. People often ask me if I have Chinese things at home and in fact I do not. If you came to my house you would know that I was interested in China from my bookshelves, but I do not have Chinese pictures and carpets and so on.
A lot of the things I am most interested in I do not actually like, such as export art. The vibrations that it gives off to somebody like me are very redolent of English--and I mean "English" not British, remember I am not English--aristocratic culture of the eighteenth century, which is not a culture I find particularly attractive. I am conscious that I am one of the serfs standing outside the mansion.
So I do not love these objects or fantasize myself into a situation of myself in a wig. Even Ming furniture, which is astonishingly beautiful and one of the treasures of the whole world, I do not ache to possess. One of the things about working in the museum is that you are overwhelmed with these possessions and also with the need to take care of them. Everything you have got has to be meticulously documented and cared for.
When you get home you just want to forget about all that. You do not have to measure things. Your carpet is just a carpet and if you break something then so what. I like to have nice things at home, but I like to have cups that, if I drop them, it is not the end of the world. In the museum you have to concentrate--when you pick an object up you have to concentrate on picking it up. If you did it at home it would drive you crazy.
Q. Spending your days among these antiques, can you say what kind of dialogue you have with them? How do you look at them and what is your own position in relation to them?
A. When you are dealing with an historic object, the fact that it is there at all is amazing. This makes it more important than you are. That object--say a Ming vase that has been there for 500 years--the number of interactions it has had, with so many people, with all their rich ideas and associations. . . . You are just one more person on its journey through time, a mere moment, and you must be humble about it. I must be particularly humble because I am dealing with the products of another people's culture. I can understand up to a point, but there are levels of understanding that one may never reach.
I was very struck when reading the Sinorama volume of interviews with distinguished sinologists, how many of them said they wanted to write things that Chinese scholars would take seriously. They want to analyze texts in the traditional Chinese way and do not just want to interpret things for a Western audience. Well I have more modest aims. What I am doing is my best to interpret the products of Chinese culture to a Western audience.
Wealth of a King--Humility of a Servant
Q. Some people say that a museum curator is like a magnificent king among his collection of treasures. What do you feel like?
A. Do I feel like a king? Sometimes I feel burdened by so many objects. It is almost as if they are all children wanting attention. We have always got to improve the storage and the documentation and there is always another one shouting "what about me!"
It is always a privilege, but kings have people to do things for them. Sometimes I feel like they are the king and I am the servant. I am here because of them not them because of me.
[Picture Caption]
Like a king with his riches? Craig Clunas in the recently opened T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese Art at the V&A. (photo by Arthur Cheng)
(Left) Victoria and Albert Museum exterior.
These pretty ladies can nod their heads! An example of eighteenth-century ceramics exported in bulk.
This hauli wood secretaire bookcase mixing East and West can be identified by concealed characters reading, "Ship's captain no 4--Bookcase."
"Peeping Tom!" Obviously for export only. Look carefully and you will see that the lady's posture is typical of Ming and Ch'ing folk art.
A late eighteenth century glass painting " Pair of Lovers" from Canton which is already very Westernized.
Much of the early picture of China was derived from this kind of export `painting.
The traditional Chinese folk story of the Water Margin on this vase is often seen in homes of the European aristocracy.
A dessert basket and tray like this is nice to look at in a museum but might put one's nerves on edge at home.
Like a king with his riches? Craig Clunas in the recently opened T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese Art at the V&A. （photo by Arthur Cheng）
These pretty ladies can nod their heads! An example of eighteenth-century ceramics exported in bulk.
"Peeping Tom!" Obviously for export only. Look carefully and you will see that the lady's posture is typical of Ming and Ch'ing folk art.
"Peeping Tom!" Obviously for export only. Look carefully and you will see that the lady's posture is typical of Ming and Ch'ing folk art.
A late eighteenth century glass painting " Pair of Lovers" from Canton which is already very Westernized.
Much of the early picture of China was derived from this kind of export `painting.
The traditional Chinese folk story of the Water Margin on this vase is often seen in homes of the European aristocracy.
A dessert basket and tray like this is nice to look at in a museum but might put one's nerves on edge at home.
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