Travel, collecting, and museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

After a concise survey of recent writing on Western Collections and Museums, Chang divides her inquiry into four main parts: The Historical Terms of Euro-Asian Object Acquisition; Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Cernuschi’s Collection and Reappraisals of Europe and Asia; The Labour of Travel: Guimet and Régamey in Asia; and Equivalence and Inversions: France, Japan, and China in Goncourt’s Cabinet. Chang basically wishes to update and re-position art historical understanding of the collections of Cernuschi and Guimet by initially bracketing them with comparative understanding of the reports by Westerners in China and Japan, and by Japanese and Chinese in Europe and America. She ultimately concludes with a view of one collection and its displacement of Japanese and Chinese materials into a literary domain, that of Édmond de Goncourt’s writing about his collection from which wider deductions can be made about the meanings of its decorative display. If ‘Historical terms..’ is about the perceptions of material flows within a network of inter-cultural experiences, ‘Equivalence and Inversions..’ is about reception without cultural experience and the use of one set of cultural objects to subvert the authority patters of another in favour of its pre-French Revolutionary past.