 And thank you all for joining us this evening. I just wanted to give a couple of shout outs before I begin, especially to Shria, Ella, and Sarah here at the PMC, as well as Karina Corrigan, Sophie Ong, Julie Belmere, and Patricia Ferguson, who I believe is back there. And my Met colleagues, Joe Shire-Dolberg, Young Bae, Peng Yang Lu, Niva Lon, and Eleanor Hyun. And finally to Rachel, who I'm delighted to be speaking with tonight about feminist revisions of Shinwazuri as part of the in-conversation New Directions and Art History here at the PMC. So the starting point for my talk is a reverse painted mirror depicting a woman smoking a pipe, recently acquired by the Met, and what role her appearance in the mirror might play in rethinking Shinwazuri through a feminist lens. Shinwazuri, a style of decoration that emerged in early modern Europe, has typically been pictured as a neutral, harmless, and nostalgic fantasy of the exotic Far East, embodied by the traffic trade and ravenous consumption of luxury objects during the 18th century, such as wallpaper, lacquer, porcelain, and reverse painted mirrors, such as this one. Dating to around 1760, the cylinder blown mercury glass was probably made in France, then shipped to Canton where it was painted on the reverse side and exported back to the European market. Set within an imitation lacquer frame, a bust-length depiction of a woman is shown in a blue Manchu style dress, her shoulders covered by a sumptuous ermine cape, decorated with black tipped tails. Her totly combed hair is set within an elaborate hairstyle, the precursor to the Lingyang Batu, from which strands of pearls and coral beads dangle past her triple pierced ear. Both hair and piercing signal her identity as a Manchu, the people who ruled the Qing dynasty in China from 1644 to 1911. Behind her on a table is a blue and white porcelain vase set into a carved stand, similar to a soft-paced example made in the 18th century at the Met. The blooming peonies in the vase echo the Paris set into the woman's hair. Multi-tasking in the semaphores of desire, she clutches in her right hand a red silk handkerchief, softly crushed under light digital pressure into abstract folds that echo the creases in her blue horseshoe sleeves, trimmed with fur. With the edge of her left pinky, with the edge of her left pinky nail, she strokes a soft fur cape while her pointer finger definitely hooks around a tobacco pipe, from which she has just taken a long drag. The small bowl still containing a dot of orange ember within the gray ash. And as an aside, I had a funny exchange with a colleague at the museum about whose pipe it was, whether it was hers or she was sort of offering it to a man just off of you. And I said, this is definitely a woman who knows what she's doing. It's definitely her pipe. We might initially classify this mirror as but one among the many types of export objects made in Canton to satisfy European consumers voracious appetite for ornate lacquer furnishings, porcelain silks and mirrors with which to decorate their interiors outfitted in the Chinese taste. Sorry. Oh, I seem to have missed a picture. In this context, reverse painted mirrors as Thierry-Oderick and other scholars such as Patricia Ferguson and Karina Corrigan have shown played a prominent role in the cultural encounters between China and the West. Where specialized workshops in Canton painted over damaged areas and then sent them back to Europe. But for the purposes of my talk, I wanna shift the focus from broader systems of Sino-European culture exchange and attend instead to the specificities of this particular mirror, how it looks and how it functions and what it might tell us about the economies of female desire that shaped Shunwa Zuri. I wanna start with this question. What is a woman doing on the mirror who looks back at us, occupying such a large part of the surface? Her appearance unsettles the typical frameworks of Western art history where mirrors operate as symbols of beauty, mimesis, vanity, and artistic faints, all of which were predicated upon a language of sameness and symmetry. Here instead is a figure of difference. For a comparison, look at Johann Zafini's painting of Queen Charlotte, a contemporary portrait from 1764 that features a mirror on the royal dressing table, which she uses to capture a monumental profile of the queen seated before her children. Marcia points and writes that the mirrored image reminds viewers that the painted queen is far from being a self-determined individual interpolated by her position and rank, quote, always more than herself, always reducible or elevated to emblem, end quote. The woman in the mirror is the opposite of Queen Charlotte in more ways than one. Following point in, if the mirror in Zafini's painting entraps the queen's portrayal into an immobile emblem, how might a piece of authorless decorative export art of a generic beauty offer a space of freedom? What happens when the mirror so often seen as a blank space for pure projection, fantasies of the self or symmetrical reflection is already occupied? When we first acquired the mirror, I had felt uncanny bringing it into the storeroom. As an object, it's the right fit since there are plenty of other chinoiserie objects and export art in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. Yet repeatedly I felt compelled to explain her appearance. What she was doing there, it only struck me later while photographing the object that this discomfort perhaps had less to do with her and more to do with the other woman in the mirror. Not to make everything about me, no, I'm just kidding. It felt weird to find myself like I wasn't supposed to be there. This uncanny process made me realize the ways in which the decorative arts, because of their continuing use value as functional objects, demand a different kind of engagement than a signed portrait authored by a painter. An increasing number of scholars have considered chinoiserie from a critical vantage point. David Porter, Chi-Ming Yang, and Elizabeth Kowalski for example, have discussed the ways in which chinoiserie objects mediated and shaped notions of the self, subjectivity, and nation in 18th century Britain. Chinoiserie's long afterlives continue to shape present day understandings of race and gender as Anne Chang has demonstrated in her work on a theory of ornamentalism. Chang considers how the blurred status of persons and things can provide the starting point for different notions of subjectivity, quote, an alternative track within the making of modern Western personhood, one that is not traceable to the ideal of a biological, organized, and masculine body bequeaths from a long line of enlightenment thinkers, but is instead peculiarly synthetic, aggregated, feminine, and non-European, end quote. By contrast, the traditional story of export art is that it simply answered the commercial demands of Europeans hungry to consume material fantasies of the far away and strange, all the while generating profits for the East India Company, which oversaw the goods arriving from China. Though decorative arts objects form but a small portion of the East India Company's cargos, they were central to the private trade that employees conducted individually to supplement otherwise low incomes. Head merchants known as supercargos, a number of whom were depicted in reverse painted mirrors such as this portrait of John Pike, probably helped to generate the taste for reverse painted mirrors. The earliest examples were painted on damaged European plate glass, unsold stock shipped to Canton because of its poor quality and lack of domestic market. The Dutch probably helped to establish the taste. In 1664, the ambassador of the Dutch VOC offered gifts to the new Qing emperor that included, quote, four mirrors decorated with paint. The earliest recorded example in China, in the domestic context was in 1722, when a dignitary, probably a Canton merchant, sent mirrors decorated with, quote, flowers along the edges as tribute to the Kangxi emperor. Patricia Ferguson has pointed out that in contrast to earlier examples of several plates pieced together, as in this work of the V&A made from seven panels and cold painted on the surface. The Chinese examples used looking glass mirrors, large single panels of silver glass. Costly to make and ship, these had never before been decorated on the reverse side. Evidently, these were prized at the Qing court of Qianlong. In 1741, Brother Atire, a French Jesuit who worked at the court described painting on the mirrors, quote, which the mandarins of Canton buy from the merchant ships and offer to the emperor, end quote. Damaged during shipping, Atire writes that, quote, the emperor wished a way to be found to save such a precious object, end quote. Qianlong found the mirror so appealing that an imperial workshop was established. Atire then went on to describe the process of making the mirrors, of transferring images onto the back of the mirror so that the pencil or colored lines remain imprinted on the silvering, only in the places to be painted and the rest is left as a mirror. The desired effect created in his words, attractive variety, quote, this type of painting is all the more beautiful because when seen from a short distance, it seems as if the figures, animals, landscape or any other design is not painted on the mirror but reflected. One's face can be seen in the gaps left by the painting, which makes for very attractive variety, end quote. Even before the emperor, the wealthy compradors in Canton, who traded with Western merchants, established the taste for the mirrors, commissioning portraits of their families along the Pearl River waterfront, as well as designs that featured birds, flowers and beautiful women. Reverse painted mirrors might thus be seen as part not only of a broader export taste but what Yuan Kun has described as a regionalized Chinese Canton culture. Shortly after, mirrors appeared in Europe in the mid 18th century where they were incorporated into interiors decorated in the Chinese taste, such as the one that King Adolf Friedrich of Sweden had made at Drotningholm Chinese Pavilion in Stockholm. In France and England, merchants and aristocrats both incorporated reverse painted mirrors into coordinated interiors intended to bring the far away into the comforts of the home. Reverse painted mirrors were but one category of object among many that shaped the taste for chinoiserie, an aesthetic system driven by commerce that emphasized surfaces and the superficial, patterns and motifs rather than the depiction of individual subjects with histories, figures of sentiment or deep thought. As Stacy Sloboda writes, quote, objects in the Chinese taste were prized for their ability to reflect light which kept their visual interest firmly on the surface, end quote. She points to John Stocker and George Parker's 1688 treatise of Japaning and varnishing where the designers celebrate the glossy finish of this imitation lacquer, quote, what can be more surprising than to have our chambers overlaid with varnish, more glossy and reflecting than polished marble. No amorous nymph need entertain a dialogue with her glass or narcissist retired to a fountain to survey his charming countenance when the whole house is one entire speculum, end quote. Paradoxically, while chinoiserie in Europe proposed a world of surfaces, reverse-painted mirrors in the Qing context incorporated Western techniques of illusionism which gained courtly favor under Chen Long. In particular, Western illusions such as perspectival depth and shading became key features of Mehran painting, depictions of beautiful women. These gained popularity in the 17th and early 18th century as painting studios emerged and flourishing urban centers in the South, far from the Corten and North and fueled in particular by wealthy merchants. Generic depictions of ideal types, Mehran-Hua were intended for the commercial market. However, one of the most famous series known as the 12 Beauties Painting and painted in ink on hanging scrolls were made for the Yongzhang Emperor and displayed at the Summer Palace. Wenchen Cheng has viewed the women with their Han Chinese robes as Qing court adaptations of the Mehran genre. Signs of cultivation combined with quote, items commonly associated with romantic feelings and longings such as the round fan, mirror, bed curtains, paired magpies, cats, butterflies and double rings quote. Also described as vernacular painting, these pictures of generic courtesans, prostitutes and women of ambiguous social status were intended for use and pleasure where perspectival illusionism and figuration placed them at the bottom of the painting hierarchy at the opposite end of ink painting and calligraphy, revered by dispassionate literati connoisseurs who mostly had eyes for landscapes. Adding to their lowly status was the shift that took place in the depiction of Mehran from chased figures in outdoor settings patiently awaiting husbands to what one scholar described as hot pictures. Not my language. These later examples showed women in languorous poses and interiors surrounded by luxurious objects looking directly out at the viewer in an explicit appeal at sexual desire. Here, Western perspective and illusionary techniques were used for the pleasure of the presumed male viewer. To take one example, this Mehran has draped herself next to a table, coily curling a pinky near her mouth and staring at the viewer. A so-called hot picture is thus described in phallocentric terms. Quote, the painting suggests to the male viewer the possibility of penetrating both the woman depicted and the space of the picture itself through a visual probing. The believable space that opens around the woman allows us not just to see her but to apprehend her, surround her, embrace her visually and affect strongly enhanced when the figure is itself represented volumetrically. End quote. I am no expert in Chinese painting, but I'm struck by the contrast between the great care taken to describe the technical details of painting, a painting such as this one, and the relatively impoverished critical language around desire, which simply assumes a male subject who targets and apprehends the object of a sexual desire. And here, I want to turn back to a European discourse of shinwazuri and ask, can we in fact envision shinwazuri as paradoxically a critical intervention in that system of phallocentric desire? One that is not about apprehending a body or object, but consists in a range of reflective surfaces that defer and deflect any sense of a singular target. It creates to borrow the words of Stalker and Parker, a speculum of desire, a term that might give readers a feminist philosopher, Lucy Rigoray, pause for thought. Could shinwazuri with its surfight of materials, surfaces and visual overload be conceived as a modality of looking where the subject is not only the source of agency, but the surface that responds, refracts and acts upon the picturing subject? I want to conclude with a number of reverse painted portraits of European women. These tend to be grouped separately from the Mayran pictures, even though they correspond in compositions and decorative motifs. For example, in this portrait of Frances Ravel, wife of an East India company merchant and her daughter, both are dressed in Manchu costume, seated on a veranda overlooking the Canton waterscape, elements that recall the mirrors made for local merchants, which showed beauties overlooking the Pearl River. The setting is imaginary since it would not have been allowed to accompany Mr. Ravel to Canton. One of the women in another pair of mirrors adopts the same direct look at the viewer as the Mayran. The portraits were commissioned by Captain John Lennox, another East India company man of Elizabeth and Christian Graham around 1785, twin sisters and the daughters of a neighbor in Scotland. The portraits are framed by imitation lacquer, which was encased in a pair of later Giltwood Regency frames from around 1820. The poses are conventional, adapted from British portraiture of the period, though the tree foliage and the birds indicate that they were probably painted at the same Canton workshop as the Ravel portrait. Lennox was said to be in love with Elizabeth, she looks off in the distance on the right. Lennox also had his own likeness done, suggesting that he used the mirrors to try out his image with each of the sisters. On the one hand, the portraits of European women can be considered as a form of cultural appropriation, where their lifelike portrayal takes the place of generic Mayran. On the other hand, Lennox's portraits, as creepy as they are, also point to the ways in which mirrors operated as a means for imagining the self in different contexts, scenarios, and possibilities. Luckily, neither sister married him. To come back to the woman on the mirror, is penetration really the only way to look at her? The crowded field of luxury objects that feel the composition and adorn her body suggests that she's meant to be an object of desire, from the taut strands of hair echoing her fur coat to the round eyes that look like pearls. Possession here is the watchword. Except for the parts where you're not looking. After all, as Brother Ahtiri reminds us, you find your reflection not in the painting, but in the gaps left behind. Finding yourself all depends on your position and where you choose to be in relation to her. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. Many thanks, firstly, to Iris for organizing this. When her invitation arrived, I had just finished doing a panel on teaching fashion in global history. And I spent much of the time bemoaning the absence of connective and comparative histories in fashion history. And I think this is also true of art history. So it's very exciting to be here with a room full of European scholars. And I'm extremely grateful to the Paul Mellon Center for their impeccable organization. So this carved and painted poor poster bed of the mid-18th century is typical of Shinwazuri with its foot posts of bamboo bundles and its cornices with even more bamboo leaves. It is also typical in the original silk curtains which feature oversized Chinese women wandering in gardens. Now, these curtains disappeared sometime between the bed entering the V&A in the 1920s and today. So I've included a similar panel of embroidered silk also from the V&A, although slightly later, to give you a sense of the disproportionate size these women occupy. And yet, despite this oversized place, the experience of Qing women is not an area that can be said to have been well explored in either objects or histories of Shinwazuri. And you might think this is unsurprising. After all, this bed fits the definition of Shinwazuri as Eurocentric whimsical treatment of Chinese forms careless of actual significance or usage. But more recent work on Shinwazuri has positioned it less as fanciful ornamental excess and more as a shared global visual space whose dynamic was driven by fashion. And it is in the spirit of this approach that I wish to probe the relevance of Shinwazuri to Chinese women's history. So by positioning works of Shinwazuri alongside this fashionable robe worn by a mid-ching princess, also adorned with figures of Chinese women, I suggest several reasons why this history merits inclusion. So first, by exploring the experience of Chinese women, specifically their textile and clothing consumption and specifically that of the Qing Dynasty social counterparts to the privileged European women who consumed Shinwazuri objects, I want to offer a counter to the generic Chinese woman described by David Porter memorably as inevitably at leisure, tranquil and content. So here I think that Qing fashion offers an arena of specificity and agency that refutes Shinwazuri's imagined Qing beauties as languorous and ahistorical. I think it disrupts the tranquility of Porter's framing. Second, by considering Shinwazuri's potential for contesting female subjectivities, I think we find that in both China and Europe, material culture enabled women a space for thoughts and desires that were theoretically less controlled by men. And particularly intriguing here is this notion of Shinwazuri as a counter cultural taste that empowered peripheral groups in their subversion to classical tradition, offering a new space to construct identity. And in my book on leaching dress, which is really about the 19th century, I make an argument for fashion as a critical framework in Chinese women's history, one that acknowledges their active role as consumers and producers. And although I think we have to be really wary about cross-cultural comparisons, I think it's treacherous territory for reifying cultural distance. There is a need for a starting point that contains often unstated value. But all the same, considering Qing dress alongside Shinwazuri objects allows us to find commensurability rather than separation, to connect different experiences rather than exclude, it challenges Shinwazuri's othering. So let's consider the framing of this satin women's robe when it was first shown in North America in the early 20th century. So its scenes of beauties led the robe to be nicknamed by curators as the ladies in the garden or the water garden robe, and they lorded it rather as a Shinwazuri object. So it was delicacy and refinement. It was a melody of grace and charm. And in the context of the museum collection, the robe was viewed as far from processes like commercial production, fashion and board demand, or popular design influences, even though, as we're going to see, those are exactly the forces creating this robe. Instead, for the curator, Alan Priest, the appeal of these garments lay precisely in them being beyond everything else. As with Shinwazuri imagery, it was claimed as exotica, outlandish, beyond. And this framing I reject in my work, as I said, I'm trying to find a shared space that's revealed in the discourses and processes of fashion. So the robe dates to the early 18th century. However, it wasn't discovered until the 1930s, and this happened after railway diggers in Herbe, a province in China unearthed the tomb of Prince Guo, whose portrait you see here. He was the 17th son of Kangxi Emperor. And I've shown you images of the before, and the inside and outside of the tomb. So we believe that it was once worn by either his primary wife, Lady Niu Rihou, or his concubine, Lady Meng, and the robe is damaged, so it only survives in three fragments. And I'm showing you the main portion here. It's from the front of the robe. And as you can see, it's decorated with these four roundel scenes, all of which are very finely embroidered in what is, compared to the 19th century anyway, a fairly somber palette of these browns and greens and golds. And each of the roundels shows beautifully dressed women who are engaged in leisurely activities. They carry vases of flowers, they write calligraphy. The robe is incredibly embroidered with a very rich variety of stitches that are used to highlight the luxurious dress and furnishings. So if we start with the silhouette, we can see. So, yeah, if we start with the silhouette, we can see that it's a fashionable one. So it features the round neck and the overlapping front straight sleeves and widening skirts of early mid-ching robes. As we heard, the Qing dynasty rulers were of Manchu ethnicity, and they used dress to assert this identity. So in this regard, we can compare it to a contemporaneous garment from another tomb, the Kangxi emperor's third daughter, Princess Rongxian. Rongxian was sent to Inner Mongolia at the age of 19 to marry a Mongolian prince. And her tomb contained hundreds of objects, including 10 garments on her body. So the garment I'm showing you was the innermost garment and it's embroidered with antique motifs. So we're seeing this kind of commonality in early mid-imperial robes, and we can compare both of these to our earlier stated example of this kind of informal robe, which comes from the mid-18th century. And this style is gonna evolve and it's gonna become the most popular informal style for Qing Manchu women. So these robes inform upon the use of dress to visualize ethnic and cultural identity. Something that mattered a great deal for women in this period. Each group maintained defined styles of dress, and this is something that's nicely visualized for us in John Thompson's photograph of a Manchu woman and her hand attendant side by side. And it does get, you know, there are kind of nuances and complexities, but basically we can see that the Manchu woman wears a long, continuous robe, and the hand woman wears the segmented silhouette of jacket and skirt. So these ideals were maintained by rules and regulation and above all moral discourse that instructed women how to dress in an appropriate manner. And in my book I study these forms of control. One example I have is a 19th century emperor who penned edicts on what court women should wear and then ordered them to be hung in the palace apartments so these women could see these words at all times. And yet, even while there are certain difference, Manchu women's dress was produced not necessarily in the capital but often by hand ethnicity, hand-decrafted workers in the South. So we know from Imperial archives that the robes of both Princess Rongxian and that of the Prince Guards tomb were produced in the Suzhou and Nanjing workshops. Suzhou in particular was the center of embroidery and silk and dress production. It was known as the embroidery market. Its embroidery was reputed to be more sophisticated than other regional styles. And all of this reputation is bound up in two things. You know, one is the fact that the textile, this region is specializing in textiles, both silk and cotton, and it also is the leader of fashion. So everybody tried to imitate the styles of the all beauties, these glamorous southern courtesans who are visualized in this screen. Indeed, it is very much through such paintings and as we'll see also prints produced by Southern urban workshops that these fashionable styles were spread throughout China and of course onwards to Europe. But the garments in the Imperial tombs demonstrate how material culture itself disseminated fashion. So silk robes are traveling through the empire, bringing Suzhou design to Beijing and on again to Inner Mongolia. Notably, however, these Chinese circuits of fashionable material culture are operating outside the commercial and visual networks of Shinoiserie. So European merchants and missionaries were able to gain access to Beijing and of course to Canton or Guangzhou, but they lack access to several key cities, particularly for my work, the textile producing commercial centers of China. So Suzhou, Songjiang, Nanjing, Hongzhou. So this gives you an idea of just how limited their access is. And obviously Europe's marginality in these networks has led some scholars to emphasize the need for a less rigidly Eurocentric model and many conceptualized Shinoiserie objects as kind of compensatory strategies for this peripheral position. But we also have I think other less convincing theory which sees Shinoiserie as an active dynamic two-way conversation. And the issue I really have with this model is this idea of China as this vast amorphous region rather than one possessing sites of cultural power with forces and movements that were created by producers and consumers. We're going to understand Shinoiserie as knowledge transfer, then we have to think about exclusion rather than access to the main centers of Chinese material culture. So we can also think about fashion in relation to the robe's roundel scenes. In both style and subject matter, they compare very closely to images, early mid-ching albums of beauties by court artists like Chen Mei, an example of which that you've seen here. And this reading, as we've seen, the Meiren reading, this generic Chinese beauty, is one of the better studied examples of subject matter. There are many studies that begin with the European subjects and ultimately are able to tie it to a Chinese print or an example of beauties. And some work on this, so I think, especially of art historian Dawn O'Dell's work on Kirchner's China Illustrated Engravings, has identified affinities between the visual strategies that are employed by artists in both China and Europe in terms of how they're both trying to elicit desire within this shared print culture. But I think this reading, so I'm gonna go back, this reading in which the representations of beautiful women serve to encourage the viewer's desire to possess both image and female subjects assumes a male audience. And when we tilt our perspective towards female audiences, we find different readings. And this relates particularly to this idea of the generic beauty because actually if we look at examples of depictions of beauties in China, this is a really large genre and there are many sub-genres, two of which are suggested by our princesses, Roeb. So in particular, the central roundel scene which shows this woman being welcomed by these very elaborate lanterns and large peacock feather fans. So this image bears a very close resemblance to paintings of palace ladies, an example which I show you here by Chen Mei. Now the thing about these paintings is that although we think of them as being depictions of beauties, they're actually really concerned with moral behavior. They were produced in series of 12, so each one depicted the appropriate custom or behavior for each month. And so they're extolling a particular kind of behavior for imperial beauties. And so they're possessing both decorative and normative functions. The curator, Wen Tianqiang, separates images of palace ladies from generic male and tool on the grounds that whereas the male and tool is emphasizing the woman's physical beauty for the pleasure of the male viewer, the images of palace lady depicts the woman's idealized behavior for the instruction of a female viewer. So we can really understand these images as being the counterpart to textual genres like these regulations that I mentioned. However, despite the fact that these textual regulations are all concerned with controlling dress and telling Manchu women what they should wear, as you can see in Chen Mei's album, the women are not wearing Manchu dress. They're wearing a slightly archaic form of han dress. And this is commonplace in much of Chinese visual culture. It's very rare to find examples of Manchu women's fashions in this kind of genre or indeed in popular vernacular culture. So I wanted to include this image because I love the counterpart of the smoking Manchu woman. It's an extraordinarily rare example of a woodblock print image showing a Manchu noble woman out on expedition. She's accompanied by her child and a coachman. And as with the mirror, she's wearing these key indicators of Manchu dress, so the headpiece, the long continuous robe, but really this is the exception that proves the rule. This is just so unusual and the much of print culture is dominated by han fashions. So we can think about how these round elves are following the example of palace imagery perhaps in which an imperial beauty functions generically, her identity reduced to participating in appropriate activities. But it's also the case that many images of Chinese beauties were not generic but specific. And rather than reflecting either moral behavior or sexual desire, their appearance referenced sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, specific stories from history, drama, and literature. And through these stories, Qing women explored what it was to be a woman in Chinese society. So here, one suggestive factor is the use of the round doll as a decorative device to mediate a design transfer to embroidery that may well have been stimulated by contemporary porcelain designs like this Shunzhe period blue and white dish that's decorated with a scene from a very popular drama of this period, The Gold Thread Pond. It's a play that depicts a romance set in the entertainment quarters and in the scene, the heroine courtesan and her fellow courtesans have been invited to a banquet where she's gonna meet her lover, a scholar. And they gather in this tree-lined space to drink and play games. And we can kind of compare the way that natural features like clouds and trees and rocks are used to frame the scene. And this porcelain design in turn was likely derived from woodblock printed, illustrated. Theatrical compendiums like the illustrations from UN dramas. So these visual sources suggest that we shouldn't be surprised that figures of Chinese beauties were embroidered onto silk robes or even that imperial ladies wore robes embroidered with scenes of beauties performing idealized activities whether they were referencing contemporary drama or ideals. Indeed, perhaps the ambiguity is the point. These visual connections underline one of the most striking aspects of Shinoiserie. It's reliance on what the historian Daniel Purdy has described as an early modern tendency to borrow, reproduce, and transfer images and texts from one material or medium to another. And of course, this visual borrowing is not just about reproduction or emulation. For its consumers, it's also about creating a visual match. It's about being able to control your environment and having the images that appear on porcelain also appearing on silk. So as with Shinoiserie, in this robe, we find a subject matter that is consciously manifested across different media. But I also think that what Purdy is calling an early modern dynamic can also be understood as a fashion dynamic. And to understand its occurrence in 18th century Chinese princesses' robes, for my last few slides, I just want to show you one of the primary mediums enabling these fashionable scenes in dress. And this is the embroidery pattern book. So we have very, very few examples of historical Chinese embroidery pattern books. Today, there would have been once hundreds of thousands of examples, but they were very much ephemeral objects. And partly mostly because of this, they have little entered discussions of design during the Ming and the Qing dynasties, let alone Shinoiserie. But we do have one example from around the same time as our fashionable princesses' robe. It's titled A Collection of Snipped Rosie Clouds. And it's a very erudite title. It comes from a Tang dynasty poem that conveys the beauty of decorated textiles. And the fact that the title is so erudite and the fact that as you can see, text is used throughout the album, both in labels and in accompanying poems, suggests that the work is targeted at illiterate readership. So this is a luxury object. It is very much fit for a princess. It also uses a very elaborate, multi-colored woodblock printing technique, which is not very easily visible here, but you'll have to trust me when I say that the color printing is extremely developed. So this is a collector's edition that's quite different to later, more mass market works. I wanted to show you this comparison. So the work on the right is an 18th century domestic encyclopedia. So you can see the kind of difference. However, the embroidery album, the earlier one, is still a practical work. It covers a wide range of objects, including cover borders, clothing borders, mirror covers, screen panels and cushion covers. And they also encompass a very wide range of imagery. This includes contemporary drama scenes. It includes popular, auspicious imagery. So on the right, we see the 100 boys at play. It also features numerous smaller overall patterns for border designs, which includes the motifs of antique objects that we saw on Princess Rongxian's robe. So this reproduction of contemporary graphic designs in a format aimed at the embroiderer demonstrates how both the embroidery pattern book and embroidered garments provided a means for women to connect with this visual culture. It provided a medium for circulating knowledge. So to conclude, I'd like to return to our bed, which was donated to the V&A in the 1920s, just two decades before the princess's robe was first shown in North America. It entered the collection at a juncture of renewed interest in Shinoiserie and the interior designer, Siri Moham, reproduced versions of this bed and sold them to two American clients. So we see how Shinoiserie's cycles return anew, visually unchanged, even whilst enormous changes had taken place, not just in China, but also in Western understanding of Chinese dress and in the representation of Chinese people in the popular imagination. To me, the robe exposes the deceptiveness of Shinoiserie's visual stability. For like the bed or indeed the mirror that's designed for a European consumer, these embroidered robes depict women, both real and imagined, in different postures and dress. And like the bed curtains, these embroideries derive from imagery circulating in pattern books, contemporary paintings, and print culture. But these embroideries will produce the Chinese female consumers, and in an intriguing act of self-referentiality, the female figures are placed on the very surface that covers the woman's body. Perhaps, despite the strictures of imperial dress, as informal robes, they were permitted a certain freedom for experimental self-fashioning. But we see how these robes, like Shinoiserie, present decontextualized fragments of meaning adopted from contemporary art and literature and reformed in purpose and visuality, with their stylistic influence stemming from many hundreds of miles away in Suzhou. Shinoiserie was hardly unique in affecting such brickolage. But I think this robe also clarifies how our understanding of Shinoiserie so often emits the key players of these fashion networks, the publishers of woodblock-printed patterns, the embroiderers who took influence from contemporary prints and painting, and the princesses who emulated the southern fashions. Thank you. I really want to ask, so I'll make sure I get it in. So, as you can see, I'm very interested, sorry. As you can see, I'm very interested in the relationship between text and image. And I wanted to come back to your 18th century mirror and the specificity of it. It is so incredibly detailed, not just in the, as we saw, the details of the Manchu dress, but also in the bars and those peony flowers. Obviously, I think about auspicious language and peonies being symbols of wealth. And so, I wonder how far it is speaking to an audience that is both interested in these details and also knowledgeable about these details. How far do you think the female consumers of your mirrors were reading about China? How far would they have understood those details? Thanks, Rachel, that's a great question. And I was hoping to avoid the question of who was this made for, which is something that I was kind of skirting around. I mean, one, and in fact, maybe I could toss the question back to you, but I wonder in the specificity of details and their highly, you know, their high reference to Manchu identity, in fact, if we're not looking at something that's strictly for export, but is a part of that kind of hyper-localized, you know what Yuan Kun calls Guangzu slash Canton, right? This weird place where a local merchant town culture is kind of colliding with and responding to this elsewhere in Europe. And I wonder if this isn't maybe an instance of that, but to come back to the question of a female consumer, I imagine that it's something like the detail, and I'm thinking of a kind of Naomi shore, sort of the detail as a feminine device. And in its specificity, it's kind of signaling a type of desire that has less to do with the reference to the historical context of Manchu identity versus Han. And more to do with the kind of consumer, right? Maybe not possession though, I don't know, but I do think when it switches to the European female consumer context, it's being channeled into a different kind of thing, right? And the fact that it's a mirror that you're looking at a picture of yourself alongside this woman who looks a certain way, I think that's doing a kind of work that is maybe different from if it was for a kind of local Chinese context, but I don't know. Right, well, I mean, that's why I really wanted to include that print of the Manchu woman smoking the pipe, but to make this point that these images are appearing in export art perhaps more than they're appearing in Chinese visual culture. It does change in the 19th century. In the 19th century, you got to start to get court painting, which is very attentive to details. I don't want to overstate my case, but that print is very rare. No, and I love, I mean, I was gonna ask you too, the fact that you ended with print culture, which we always, not always, but we tend to assume as being kind of mass produced, right, the multiple, the many, and how do you sort of study it from the position of the fact that it's rare now? And what does that say about this notion of fashion and its uses and its consumption? I was just curious. It's really difficult to get it. I mean, the print I showed you came from the Suzhou region. You have, obviously, you have these regional specialties in woodblock prints, and there are two main regions, one in Suzhou and one in the north, in Yangzhou today, just all the way there. And the Suzhou print quarters was destroyed in the Taiping rebellion. Just, you know, there are nothing from that period survived. Things survived from earlier, a lot of them from Japanese collections, actually, and we have this one rare example, but so it means it's impossible to get at that idea of copies and many different versions, particularly the Suzhou, it's easier for the northern, for the northern prints. So that's difficult. And the same with the embroidery pattern books. Yeah, and it actually reminds me of something. I'm teaching a class at Cooper about shinwazuri, and one of the things that we kind of landed upon was this tension between collecting versus use, in the sense that shinwazuri, as a category, tends to be circulated in the kind of use part where you're not thinking about perhaps the longevity or the survival of the thing or, you know, putting it away on a shelf. It's just in your space versus collecting with its kind of preciousness and curated quality. And I'm wondering too if, you know, fashion, like how do you deal with the fact that you're coming at it from a different perspective where the rarity is because so much hasn't survived because it's been in circulation, as opposed to, you know, like this collecting of this robe, which maybe wasn't meant to be collected and sort of preserved in that way. Yeah, in my book I end on this observation about how, you know, broaching dynasty women who would have been so surprising that, you know, their garments ended up in European and American collections and ended up as collectors. Items often housed within departments of Chinese art, right, not even departments of dress and textiles. So there is very much this reframing of an object of use in which in China would never have been considered as art. And I think that's a difficult framing. And I think that's something we should critique and engage with. Just because some people online are saying they're not hearing you so well. So let's just try that one and then we'll... I think that's better. Let's try it. Yeah, so I critique that framing. And I do think it's a problem, but this is actually something I wanted to ask you about because I was thinking how with your mirrors that you're kind of doubly, not half it, but there's a double issue here. On the one hand, these mirrors are decorative objects and so within hierarchies of value, they're considered, you know, not high art because they're functional and they're decorative arts. And then they're also kind of hampered by the fact that they depict these mailer and these beauties, which in Chinese visual culture also positions them on the lower end of hierarchy of art history values. And I was interested in how as a curator you deal with that because on the one hand, I'm sure you want audiences to come to your objects with fresh eyes, right? You want them to see these objects for themselves and not think about all this baggage of, you know, 18th and 19th century curators and their hang-ups. But on the other hand, I can easily imagine how a 21st century consumer is gonna see an 18th century mirror like that and just think about Instagram and filters. The idea of seeing yourself through this kind of change lens. So I wonder how you deal with that or how you think about that and how you... I think it's a challenging question. I'm sure there's no simple answer. Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think this mic works better than that one. So next time I'll hand it to you. Can I just share a moment? Yes. Because we've got over a line. Oh, great. And then they really wanna hear you. Yes. So if you don't mind, we'll try and sort of sell you the mic. So her question was, how do you approach this material from the position of today? And I think it's a great question and I had a related one, which is in a process of revision of a historical subject, especially one as fraught and kind of loaded with signification, as significance, as chinoiserie, how do you both revise, but not completely override and kind of redo it all? Because I do think there is a delicate balance between a critical reframing and a complete throwing out the baby with the bathwater, which I would never wanna do. You wanna keep the baby and the bathwater. Hold the baby. Yeah, hold the baby. But I do think that, rigorous historical contextualization is so important. And your work is a prime example of that in that you can't do the kind of critical repositioning and reframing unless you have a very strong grasp and a commitment to its historical circumstances. And I think things only gain traction and meaning when you know what the history is and that's why I think the historical research component is so important. And I think it's a challenge in the museum context because you can't make people sit down and read like a 400 page volume, right? Especially on a topic as huge as chinoiserie, east-west relations, the Qing dynasty. I think I read one book and I know that's just the tip of the iceberg. But I do think what's great though, on the other hand about the museum is that your starting point, you're to use a Harry Potter reference, your portal key. Sorry, that's terrible. Your starting point is the object. This is a totally different position from which to start. And any theoretical, methodological, historical thesis that you come up with has to be able to respond to the objects. And it's always your sort of test case. And I think to me that's sort of an interesting problem. But I think you're absolutely right. There is a kind of double bind where you wanna bring this material kind of up to date and to be able to respond to new approaches to stuff. But on the other hand, you want to give it the kind of care and consideration of a historical framework. So, I mean, it's very much, and I'm gonna hand the mic over to you, like with fashion, right? I mean, how do you, it's fashion. Fast fashion, slow fashion, but it's fashion. How do you take a kind of historical, critical intervention? Yeah, I can see how those positions are similar. I think for me, it was always about take, the historical grounding is very important and establishing that context. And I do that in my work through through finding as many sources as possible that can allow us to see how people at the time viewed these objects. So, but I can kind of shield myself against this tendency to particularly with fashion to read contemporary fashion systems back onto Qing Dynasty fashion, which would clearly be wrong. So for me, it's about finding the songs and the plays and the diaries and the local gatteteers. And even the moral discourse, even these countless men who go on and on about what women should wear and how they shouldn't wear this and they should wear that and why are they wearing this? Even that is really important evidence. And I think the more you have that, the more you can be careful that you're not reading backwards. Yeah. Great, shall we? We're going to have to do a lot of community sharing this evening, but I think that will, let's see if that one will work as well. I'll be looking at questions as well that are coming online and I'm sure people have thoughts and ideas in the room as well. But just before I open it out for questions, I did want to ask you both about this project of revision and challenge because I get the sense from both of your presentations that there's a slight frustration or a sense that you want to shake things up and change the discourse or the debate. And I don't know whether there's, or there probably is, particularly context of that within a museum framework. I receive already pointed to that about what you do about the relationship between text and object and interpretation, the act of interpretation. And I think Rachel, to use your phrase, you talked about a challenge to Shinwaza Re's othering. So I just wanted, and especially because I'm coming from outside of this field, so I'm kind of finding my way in through your talks, am I right in getting a sense of a frustration or a sense that we've got to change the debate around Shinwaza Re's. There are the kind of major forces at play in kind of moving this debate into new areas and just this sense of revision and then feminist revision. I just would like to just hear a bit more from both of you about where you're coming from and a kind of state of the field, just to help me and others perhaps orientate themselves within these debates. Say something. I mean, with me, clearly my work is on fashion and fashion, as I'm sure a lot of you know has traditionally been conceptualized as a system of dress which was geographically and historically specific to Europe, right? So it starts in something like 15th century Europe. And over the last two decades, three decades, there has been a very thorough challenging to that kind of conceptualization and we now have fashion history scholarship for a number of regions and we have a much wider and more encompassing definition of fashion as taking place in many different times and places. I think the problem and this I kind of alluded to this in the beginning of my talk is that we're now in a position where we have quite good literature in lots of different areas but they don't tend to meet very much and I think that's something that I'd really love to see more of more connective and comparative work. Well, I think for me, you know, I never, I wasn't attracted to the topic of chinoiserie, truth be told, I was really interested in the French Revolution, just put this out there. And I think especially as an Asian-American woman working in a historically Eurocentric, well, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, certain things became evident to me in the process of just working in that kind of field from my own kind of subject position and I think in some ways chinoiserie to me posed the great challenge, right? Cause the questions you get are, why aren't you working on chinoiserie as if that was self-evident, which it never was to me. I'm like, well, cause I'm working on the French Revolution. So, you know, but it was kind of this moment of reckoning in 2020, especially after the massacre in Atlanta where a number of Asian-American women were killed. And, you know, I was kind of like, okay, well, it's now or never. Like, and I want to ask specifically because there was an article in Elle magazine, Elle Decor magazine where the author was asking, is there some kind of relationship between this sort of nostalgic reverie of chinoiserie and anti-Asian violence specifically towards women? And, you know, to me, I found that to be conceptually interesting and to ask, well, what would it mean to think about that from my own position, professionally, but also personally? And I think it was a kind of like confronting your own demons in a way and, you know, all this was kind of happening around the same time that I saw this mirror. And, you know, reverse-painted mirrors, as Patricia can tell you, they're sort of, you know, becoming quite a subject of interest to many scholars. And I found this one in the local New York market and I looked at it and I'm like, oh, like, what do I do with this? It was a little bit of a moment of like, how do I position myself as a scholar and a curator in relationship to this object? Because, you know, it was truly an uncanny process bringing it into the storeroom. Even though I knew, you know, export art, chinoiserie, these are subjects that European sculpture and decorative arts deal with, but when it was in the space itself, it was like I constantly found myself having to explain what is doing there. You know, what is this image of a, I mean, at that point I didn't know she was even Manchu, but this image of an Asian woman doing in the mirror. And again, I found that to be an intriguing, conceptual problem. And so that was kind of the starting point. But yeah, I mean, I think like anything that is open for revision, you have to start with the challenge. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a purely oppositional thing. It's a starting point, right? For a kind of conversation. So, you know, I think it's interesting. I don't mean that in a, oh, it's interesting. I mean, really interesting. Great, thank you. Have you got any questions, comments, thoughts to share? There is one here. Question for Iris. You seemed, I wanted you to clarify where you were suggesting the impulse for Shinoiserie came from. Because I heard two things in the talk. One was that at one moment, fleetingly, you suggested that it might be a reaction against the importation of Western illusionism. A sort of move to surface against it. And at another point, you suggested that there was a strong interest at a particular princely or imperial court for these mirrors, which would suggest an internal sort of domestic market or desire. So I'm wondering if you could clarify the relation between the two. And then in relation to the feminist theme of the talks, what does a woman have to do with that? Where does that come in as a factor? I'm scared. These are really great questions. So I didn't, and again, because my starting point was an object, I wasn't fully fleshing out the kind of Sino-European exchange. But you could say on the one hand, and Rachel, you can speak to this more than I can, but at the moment when Shinoiserie is becoming a thing in Europe, in the early modern context, you have what I believe Chinese scholars have called a kind of European wasserie. It sounds terrible, but accidentalism. But there is this kind of, and I hesitate to use the word parallel, but there is a kind of interest. And that's, as far as I understand it, it's really a kind of Qing court thing. In the Ming dynasty, you didn't really have that same sustained interest at the highest levels. And I think there was a kind of political positioning in kind of accepting that foreign culture as part of a courtly taste. But again, you can really respond to that. I can speak to that. Actually, it relates to something that I wanted to ask you about, so I must remember to end there. Yes, I mean, I think Iris is pointing out this very interesting parallel, but on the one hand, so much of Shinoiserie seems to be about surface and calling the attention to surface and keeping the attention on surface. And yet when we look at what Chinese people, or specifically the Qing court, finds interesting about Western culture, much of it is about depth, right? And it's the introduction of linear perspective that starts to occur in the mid 18th century. So Qianlong is an emperor whose court is very much associated with that introduction. And of course, you have the Jesuit missionaries, people like Castiglione, who are introducing these techniques, and you start to see a shift, right? Mitching, imperial art particularly, is forever changed by this encounter. Buildings look different, people look different, and there's a great interest in, particularly in Qianlong's court, in art that can convey that sense. The album of Palace Ladies that I showed you was a little bit before that, but Chen Mei, for example, is interested in European artists' approach to modeling, and so that starts to appear in his figures. However, so I don't know if that, oh yes, I know what I wanted to say. So however, that, firstly this is very much in the Qing court, it does circulate more widely. There are examples of other artists from regional centers who are also influenced in that way. When it comes to specifically the reverse painted mirrors, I'm not aware of a tremendous internal domestic market for that, it's not something I've looked at, so I could be wrong. I had a couple of things I wanted to say about the idea of surface, but one of them is about the sensory imagination, and the way in which so much of, when we look at that woman, particularly the smoking woman, and she's definitely smoking, by the way, man she, women were big smokers, so that's definitely historically accurate. So much of our attention is directed towards experiencing these sensory pleasures, right? The fur, the flowers, the glossiness of the porcelain, the shininess of the mirror, and so I think we're directed to stay there, the surface is keeping our attention, it's so lovely to be there. So I wanted to ask you about that and sensory imagination and how far that's something we see in contemporary accounts of Shinoiserie and how, again, I keep on thinking about your perspective as a curator and how you direct the audience to understanding that. And the other comment I might keep back because I think it's gonna overload you and it's a bit left field anyway. I'll have a drink. Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna see if I can merge the second half of Susan's question with Rachel's, which is to say, at the level of the surface, certainly you have lots of accounts that really talk about Shinoiserie as being about surface. And now the question is, how much of that was kind of rhetorical and was there any kind of possibility for creating a sort of theory? You know, because this is the great age of sensorial philosophy, right? Everything is about the senses. It's about touch, I mean, and that feeds into a kind of mercantilist discourse, right? I mean, touch stuff, it's there to be bought. The world is there to be touched and bought and leading right to Adam Smith and everything. Which leads me to Susan's question, what's it got to do with the woman? Yeah, classic Susan Siegfried phrasing, I love it. I think the question I'm trying to ask is what sort of feminist proposition, proposal approach can you get when you start with the object, right? So you don't come to the object with a ready-made theory that you apply to the object, but what can you get when you start with the object? And I think some of that has to relate with Ann Cheng's work on ornamentalism, which is to ask, it's not about recuperating a lost subject, right? It's not about recuperating a subjectivity that we can somehow extract from this enlightenment philosophy that does tend to be kind of, you know, white male history, capital M, capital H, capital W, sorry. But what if we start from the position that we don't completely revise and rewrite that history, but we started the fact that racialized and gendered notions of both self and other are not happening at the level of people, they're happening with objects, right? So that your first entry point into Asian identity, if you will, if you kind of tease out a genealogy is happening with porcelain figures that kind of look human but are talked about as objects, right? Then what kind of narrative emerges from that kind of encounter? And I think this relates to your question about curatorial work, right? You know, what sort of history can you spin when you start at the level of the object and if you want to take it to the British galleries, this is something very much that the team was trying to tease out, which is what happens when you take out all the stuff from the period room and you explode it in the middle of this gallery so that you see all this decontextualized stuff, right? And you really get that kind of Adam Smith anxiety of like, there is so much stuff to be bought and we think it's gonna solve all our problems, you know, all these things for utility, but actually it's just more crap that we have to deal with, which I think is a very modern story. It's an 18th century one too, but so that's kind of, if that makes sense in some way, I don't know, you look skeptical. I'm thinking of the image of you in the mirror, which was a wonderful moment in your talk and so are you trying to take yourself, how would you relay that image of reflection of doubling either to this court where these mirrors are going, if anything is known about the literature drama, let's say the imaginary world of that court or any place else? And both of you seem to be suggesting that in the emphasis on pattern books and embroidery that was aimed at women wearing pictures of women, that there's a desire for some level of gender identification going on. I don't know what the evidence, I don't know how much you're able to flesh that out in terms of. So I guess it's, what do you do with the image? Can I get back to you? Yeah. So in my book, which is really about 19th century China and there we have many, many objects which are embroidered with women. I have an entire chapter on them and I couldn't really have the entire book on them. So embroidery and dress and particularly trimmings and accessories become a site where you can have this form of visual representation and many of these scenes are scenes of women. Just segueing into that question online, there's a lot of appreciation online as well. So it's really nice. Thank you for questions and we'll try and get to as many of them as we can and if we can't, I'll share them with the speakers after the event as well. A question to you, Rachel, saying it's very interested in the embroidery pattern books. Do many survive and are they mostly in China or in Western collections? That's a good question. No, many don't survive. As I said, they're very ephemeral objects. I studied in my book two examples very closely, one of which is in the British Library and the other is in Soer's Library and they were both printed in Foshan which is quite near to Canton or Guangzhou and you can tell from the spine that they were basically reproduced. They took an existing pattern book, a woodblock printed pattern book and they republished it with a different title and a different cover and made a few changes. So all of this is very suggestive, of course, of this mass market publishing which is very, very difficult for us to reconstruct because we have no surviving objects. Great, thank you. And I'll just do another question. On my wall, I've got the mic. This is from Brigid von Prossum for you, Iris, but also said thank you to both speakers for your presentations and Iris just said you talked about how the mirror creates an uncanny experience of seeing one's selves in the gaps between the painted portions but it also gives the experience of looking at a surface that is claiming to be a mirror but that reflects back, not on one's own face but a different person altogether. Do you think that humor and knowing playfulness with ideas of beauty, femininity and reflection have a role to play in interpreting these sorts of objects? So humor. Humor. I've got some. Yeah, I mean, obviously I think that that goes hand in hand with entertainment, right? I mean, I think even in the Chinese context, these illusion, sort of perspectival illusion was understood to be a part of this sort of entertainment, taking pleasure in images that was quite different from the sort of scholarly erudite learned kind of thing. And I think that's actually a really great point because again, we're dealing with decorative mirrors that were hung on the wall in some part of the house, probably with wallpaper or whatever. You weren't meant to really think of it as like a Titian, right? Or a Giorgione or whoever, Zofany even. These were things that you walked by and so I absolutely do think that that whole notion of entertainment and humor. I mean, even Atire, he says, right? Variety, the sort of amusing variety that you get from seeing yourself and where you imagine the painted part to be the reflection and you're actually the person in the mirror. It's, I've really tried not to say this term, but it really does make you think like through the looking glass, right? I mean, that whole notion you sort of get where that's coming from. It's very much, I think, coming from this export market and again, it does tie into that whole fantasy, right? Of being somewhere where you're not and things like that. But yeah, for sure, I think humor. Yeah, I think amusements to all that word. An amusement and entertainment. Any other, here we go. Sorry if I completely missed it, but you know, that mirror is a really remarkable object and I certainly don't recollect ever having seen anything like it. So I mean, how far can one talk about it as a representative object or chinoiserie more generally? Or is there something very particular about it that is actually a very particular aspect of chinoiserie? I mean, that woman is so particular. I mean, are there any other things similar? Patricia? As I say, it comes from total ignorance, this question. There's a whole new book on that subject. What I think is really interesting is when you look at her, we're seeing her through our eyes, which you can't not have the baggage. But what did someone from Canton in 1760 see when they looked at her? What was the jewelry telling them? I mean, I can't help but say, oh, she's smoking, she's a prostitute. I mean, that's what I bring to it. And there is some suggestion that some of those portraits at the time were for sort of houses where women of ill repute hung out. But I also think they may have decorated a Canton merchant's home. And it's just incidental that a European gets to buy them and bring them to Europe. So she's a knowing type, I think. But the smoking's quite unique. Yeah, I love the smoking part. I mean, it's a, I think more than just Americans smoke. Yeah, that's a good point. Qing Dynasty China, I mean, it was very widespread. Yeah, yeah, but yes. Thank you. I've been, oh, hi. I've been really enjoying the interventions that you're making here, thinking about Shinwazori, thinking about women, thinking about feminism. And I just wonder where this leaves you with your use of the term Shinwazori or if this prompts us to think differently about the whole concept of Shinwazori. It's not a term that I tend to use so much now for reasons which we can discuss later. I really want to hear what you've got to say because in Iris, the piece you were talking about, we can place that very much within Shinwazori, but then you're bringing some very different questions there about who's in the reflection and does that actually change your use of that term Shinwazori? And Rachel, I was just thinking about, sometimes I felt like you were referencing a kind of a certain order of decorative objects that were reproducing China in particular ways or using Chinese imagery in particular ways and that would make it Shinwazori as opposed to Chinese. So I'm really curious to know where you're thinking, when you bring all these ideas together around women and feminism and intervention, where that's actually led you with this term Shinwazori. Thank you, Sarah, it's a great question. I mean, I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on the term and how you would replace it. I think the problem is that we would all recognize there are various issues for Shinwazori, but on the other hand, it's a term that to many people, at least, and I would not say everyone, but many people know what you're talking about when you say Shinwazori and terms are good for that. In my talk, what I'm trying to do is bring together objects which are clearly very much Chinese objects produced for a domestic market and say, well, what happens if we look at these alongside these Shinwazori objects and think particularly about place and producers and consumers and so on. So that's really the intervention that I'm trying to make, but yes, I think Shinwazori is problematic. In my bed curtains, there are oversized Chinese women wandering in gardens. What happens if we have an object that was produced for a European consumer, but they're not oversized or... So it's a term that we stretch a great deal and perhaps we do need a replacement so that we can be clearer. Thanks, that's a great question. I had this sort of issue come up in class and I sort of concluded the class with asking them, well, should we cancel Shinwazori? And they're like, well, first, they didn't even know the word existed. Second, they were like, well, then what would you replace it with? So it's sort of an interesting, right? Cancellation requires replacement within what? Which creates another term that is going to kind of collect its own baggage. To me, I think the challenge of working within the parameters of this problematic term is that precisely you can sort of push against and sort of probe and kind of question because it has a history, right? And again, I think revision isn't about throwing everything out and reinventing, I mean, I don't know, maybe French Revolution, people think differently, but it's about rethinking within the kind of constriction, right, of that term and everything that it carries and kind of being very precise, right, and surgical in the kind of critical interventions that you make. I mean, I think that's the work that a curator can do maybe in a museum context. And you have to write really good labels that are both clear, but also kind of have the capacity to take in many different viewpoints because the one thing I did learn being at the Met is that whatever you think you're writing is not the way it's gonna be interpreted. And I think what's so wonderful too about working in a museum context is that people bring so many different viewpoints, baggage, right, perspective to objects that you think the story's already been written. And I love the challenge of that openness, of having to respond to that and having to figure out, you know, we actually had a group from the Curator's Network come to the British Museum and they're like, well, what do you do if someone says you need to take something off you? And I was like, oh, it's like, that's a really good question because they think it's problematic. And I'm like, well, certainly it's something that you have to tend to with great seriousness. And I think it's really a case by case basis, but do you resolve anything by just simply removing something? Do you remove it and then explain? Do you keep it on view and then add more labels? I mean, I think all these sorts of challenges of display are what make working in a museum so incredibly fractious and kind of dangerous, but also really exciting because word choice, right, sentence construction become political acts, right, become sources of intervention. And I think that can be really powerful, but also very scary. Great, well, thank you so much. I'm aware that time is marching on. For those of us who are in the room, we can continue this discussion. And thank you so much to you both, Iris and Rachel, for, I think just, your generosity because you shared, you know, perspectives with us from your professional but also personal positions. I think we really feel like what's at stake for you as researchers, as curators. And I think that's just really exciting to hear the sort of, yeah, the energy and the edge of what you've got to say and how you shared that with us tonight. So thank you so much. Thanks to everyone who joined us online as well. Like I said, there's quite a few questions that were just like piling up. So I couldn't get to all of those, but I will share them with you. And thank you to everyone who attended tonight. Like I say, we have lots of events, both in the building and online, as well as lots of other activities. So I do hope that you'll stay in touch and interact with us in the future as well. Well, not at all. Thanks to the PMC team. And, but mainly, thank you to you both.