Chinoiserie: A Global Style
itself, and can be recognized through key visual and material
Keywords:
●● chinoiserie
●● Chinese taste
●● design circulation
●● global design history
●● Context: The Global Circulation of Objects
●● Design Circulation
●● Import Substitution and Material Emulation
●● Political and Cultural Authority
●● Commerce and the Aesthetics of Profusion
●● Playfulness and Agency
●● Exoticism and the Afterlife of Chinoiserie
C hinoiserie is a decorative style that takes images and mate-
rials thought to be related to “China”—understood as both
a specific place and a set of ideas—as its inspiration. The style
emerged in the context of early modern global trade and was a
recognizable design phenomenon across the world by the early
seventeenth century, and while it continues to be produced
in the early twenty-first century, it is a style that principally
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much
scholarship on chinoiserie has narrowly defined it as a subset
of the eighteenth-century European rococo style; in fact,
from its earliest iterations, chinoiserie was a global style that
was produced not out of a one-sided European (or Mexican,
or Persian) ignorance of actual Chinese design and culture,
but collaboratively by designers, craftsmen, and merchants
in places across the world (including China) that interacted
by way of transnational trade networks. Developed in the
context of increased circulation of materials, iconography,
and artistic conventions engendered by that trade, chinoiserie
was both a product of and a critical response to the cultural,
material, social, political, and economic experiences of global
trade. Though it is sometimes understood as such, chinoise-
rie was not simply an imperial European fantasy of an exotic
Asian wonderland, nor a passive ornamental product of Sino-
European contact. Chinoiserie was made not only in Europe,
but also in Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, the
colonial Americas, Southeast Asia, Japan, and even in China
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characteristics that unify multiple local variants. This article
introduces chinoiserie as an aspect of transnational design
practices, with an emphasis on its numerous local iterations
from the early modern period to the present day.
The diversity of the visual, material, and semiotic qualities
of these local iterations suggests that there was no single style
of chinoiserie, but rather multiple, overlapping chinoiseries
whose variants reflect the variety of their contexts. Despite
significant differences in appearance and contextual mean-
ing, there is nevertheless a substantial continuity of stylistic
principles and thematic concerns, which enable meaningful
discussion of these various iterations as a shared style, making
chinoiserie a rare example of a truly global artistic style. This
article addresses the cross-cultural production of design motifs
through materials and iconography; imitation, material, and
technological innovation; the political meanings of the style;
specific use of the style to express and negotiate gender, class,
and national identity; and its aesthetic status.
Context: The Global Circulation of Objects
Though chinoiserie appears in a wide variety of materials, it
is ubiquitous in ceramics, particularly porcelain and its vari-
ous imitations. The material that came to be recognized as
porcelain was well established in China by the Tang dynasty
(618–907), and by the fourteenth century it was part of an
unprecedented growth in commercial enterprise within China
and across the world. By the seventeenth century, Chinese
commodities of various types were fueling trade among signif-
icant parts of Asia, Eurasia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
This trade was generated by Chinese mercantile expansion and
facilitated by maritime trade networks forged by Asian and
European powers, each with competing claims to economic,
political, religious, and cultural supremacy. As Robert Finlay
(2010) has argued, “Given its volume and circulation by the
eighteenth century, porcelain yields the earliest and most
extensive physical evidence for sustained cultural encounter
on a worldwide scale, perhaps even for emergence of the first
genuinely global culture.” Though fragile, porcelain was mate-
rially suited to its role as the object of trade par excellence. It is
light, hard, and water-resistant, making it suitable for maritime
trade (in which it also sometimes acted as a physical barrier
to guard the more precious and valuable silks and spices).
Porcelain can be made in large quantities with standardized
forms and decorations through technologies of reproduction,
generating an economy of scale that made possible the trade
in relatively low-quality, inexpensive wares that characterize
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