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Paper short abstract

Based on museum ethnography in the Netherlands, this paper shows how Chinese porcelain is reordered through curatorial aesthetics that cool colonial conflict, positioning museums as infrastructures where aesthetics governs asymmetrical circulation.

Paper long abstract

The circulation of Chinese porcelain in the West was initiated in the 16th century during the era of maritime expansion. Scholars have largely viewed this circulation as a process of movement without accounting for the intricate institutional and aesthetic practices that govern the circulation of objects. Drawing from ethnographic research at museums in the Netherlands, this re-conceptualizes Chinese porcelain, whose circulation in the West is thus dependent on aesthetic and institutional practices as forms of governance.

Spanning from methods of exhibition to the curatorial display of Chinese porcelain, this study demonstrates how porcelain is incorporated within the curatorial aesthetic envisioned through taxonomies of style and refinement. Although these practices invoke a contemporary stasis of porcelain within the museum, the logistical and colonial relations that initially enabled the circulation of Chinese porcelain, particularly through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), are reorganized. Instead of contesting with the violence underlying its initial circulation, museums displace these dynamics of conflict through what I refer to as institutional cooling.

That is, the museum orders colonial asymmetries as aesthetic and taxonomic relations, thereby subjecting the object to a process of institutional cooling. This positions museums as infrastructures of circulation in which aesthetics is a technology of governance for the relational asymmetries that occur through the movement of objects. By foregrounding institutional cooling as a mode of circulation, this anthropological approach contributes to discussions on aesthetics, logistics, and relations of conflict and violence within our polarizing world.