Curiously Familiar: Art and Curio Stores in Los Angeles' Chinatown

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The letters that spell out ICG. Louie are veined with neon, and at night they illuminate front of one of remaining art and curio stores in central plaza of Los Angeles' Chinatown. Inside, rows of tea sets, fans, chopsticks, and miniature lanterns clutter long tables. On upper shelves along walls, webs of twine anchor together old vases and statuettes against unpredictable jolts of earthquakes. Across street in plaza of Chinatown West, proprietor of another store, Fong's Works of Art, has recently reduced his overhead by consolidating contents of his two storerooms into one. An orange lantern with gold characters hangs from corner of exterior sign, which is painted in sloping Roman letters that mimic calligraphic strokes of Chinese writing. Like a number of other art and curio stores in two plazas, K.G. Louie Co. and Fong's are run by American-born children of original Chinese business community. Stores such as these have operated in Los Angeles since at least end of nineteenth century. Responding to particular social and economic exigencies, early storeowners catered to popular curiosities about the Orient, refracting Western stereotypical representations of Chinese culture into commercial identities. In this article, I review development of art and curio stores from early 1900s and highlight their legacy in contemporary practices of two stores introduced above. I explore how arrangement and display of objects in these stores constitute symbolic ecologies, which mediate social interactions of proprietors. Just as subjective principles of inclusion and organization inform presentation of culture in museums and ethnographies, so too have storeowners selectively curated a version of Chinese and Chinese American culture. I suggest that over time central organizing principle of these stores has shifted. This shift roughly corresponds with transition of proprietorship from immigrant parents to their American-born children, and it involves a refraining of temporal and geographic referents of material environments of stores. DEVELOPMENT OF CHINATOWN The representation of Chinese culture in Los Angeles' early Chinatown grew out of a long history of Orient as a subject of Western collecting fads and ethnographic attention. In 1500s, European cabinets of curiosity, those precursors to natural history museums, often contained objects such as porcelain, wooden implements, and clothing from East Asia. In 1600s and 1700s, upper class Europeans developed connoiseurship of domestically produced cabinets and porcelains suggestive of an exotic Orient. In late 1800s, European and American art and design movements looked for inspiration from Asian decorative arts (e.g. Art Nouveau, Aesthetic Movement; typeface designers), and new trade agreements between American, European and Asian countries gave rise to popular collection of Oriental objects such as fans and cheap pottery. During this same period, display of Chinese people in museums, circuses, and world's fairs established a framework within which general public became familiar with viewing Chinese; a framework that highlighted their exoticness or oddity. Thus, even before Los Angeles had developed a distinguishable area known as Chinatown, Chinese or Oriental culture had been domesticated for American consumption and wonderment into a repertoire of easily recognizable forms, objects, and styles. The Chinese first showed up in Los Angeles census in 1850. By 1870s, there was a recognizable area of Chinese residential concentration specifically identified as Chinatown. At turn of century, Americans tended to regard Chinatowns in general with both condemnation and curiosity. Chinatowns were maligned as dirty, crime-infested, corrupt, and sinister ghettos. …