My dear soul-mate friend gave me my own little piece of chinoiserie, the rice bowl her great-aunt carried with her on missions to 1890s China. Miss Nellie (her name, as far as I can recollect) hoped to convert to Christianity those whom she thought of as heathen. What courage! what faith! what a sense of righteousness! to head off to an unknown land hoping that foreigners will fill up your rice bowl.
Chinoiserie, French for "Chinese in design or evocative of Chinese design," became fashionable in seventeenth-century Europe and has been in vogue ever since. Although there are similar allusions to other exotic cultures in the decorative arts, Moroccan, for instance, or Persian, there is no all-encompassing word that I know of for these other influences.
Like the travelogue in literature, chinoiserie (and other decorative allusions) give Westerners a peek into another culture, so that, by momentarily becoming outsiders, we gain insight into our own foibles and proclivities and see the other as ourselves.
Amazingly, when Miss Nellie is carrying her rice bowl among the unsaved, it is not chinoiserie. It becomes chinoiserie when it takes up residence in a Western home like mine.
1 comment:
". . .chinoiserie (and other decorative allusions) give Westerners a peek into another culture, so that, by momentarily becoming outsiders, we gain insight into our own foibles and proclivities and see the other as ourselves."
Would you care to expound on that a bit? I'm not quite sure I follow.
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